The first question I have in mind is how do we parse this. This one example
of Michaels has me a little confused:
<xsl:sequence select="xs:positiveInteger('5')"/>
This is the proposal for how to represent a typed atomic value. This is
pretty obscure to my novice eyes. Reading this I wouldn't guess off hand
that this means "Atomic value, type xs:positiveInteger, text value '5'".
Well, I think it's merit is that it's familiar syntax and semantics for
anyone who knows XSLT 2.0 or wants to go and read the spec. For many
purposes, however, a more convenient syntax would be <atomicValue value="5"
type="xs:positiveInteger"/>.
That then leads me to the final question. Suppose we transform this
serialized form "almost an xslt" format, into "real xslt" format, then
run a real XSLT 2.0 parser on it. How to get the resulting values out ?
Please bear with me as I'm very much a novice at XSLT ... maybe the answer
is "obvious".
XSLT 2.0 claims that the result of an XSLT transformation can be a 'set of
result trees'.
Thats an XDM sequence . (???)
No: XQuery can produce any XDM sequence as output (well, almost any - it
can't for example generate unparsed entities); but XSLT can only produce a
set of document nodes. You can write an xsl:function to produce any XDM
sequence as its result, but you would need a processor-specific way of
invoking the function and capturing its result in the external environment.
Incidentally, I was reminded of this project in some work with a client
yesterday. They are running MarkLogic queries and feeding the result into
Saxon, currently via lexical XML (it has to be serialized because it's on a
different machine). In this kind of scenario it would be nice to transfer a
typed document, but we really don't want a five-fold increase in document
size over the lexical XML. Size does matter.
Regards,
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay
Received on Tuesday, 29 September 2009 13:37:50 UTC