At 11:14 PM -0400 4/29/02, Mike Champion wrote:
>I'm afraid that this is so MUCH wiggle room that the W3C held a
>conference last year to solicit thoughts on how to deal with it.
>http://www.w3.org/XML/2001/07/XMLPM.html
>
No, this is a different issue. The fact that there is no processing
model simply means that documents are free to be processed by a
variety of tools in a variety of orders, as seems appropriate in the
local environment. If such a process changes the document, then that
process has produced a new document which may be passed to the next
process in the chain.
There is no ambiguity as long as you don't try to make the specs say
more than they do, or treat them as requirements rather than options.
I do not have to perform XInclusions. I do not have to perform XSLT
transforms. If I do perform them, I do not have to perform them in
any particular order, or any particular number of times.
Both XSLT and XInclusions are defined as a transformation from one
document/infoset to another document/infoset (or fragment thereof in
the case of XSLT). Neither is defined in terms of the other. Neither
is required or allowed for the other. They can be performed in
sequence, as can many other processes, but they cannot be performed
as part of the same process.
>However, the relationship among all of these W3C specifications is
>unspecified -- in
>particular the sequence in which the infoset-to-infoset
>transformations may or must be
>performed.
>
Indeed, it's a sequence and since nothing is specified, any order is
allowed. But it's still a sequence, one after the other, not one and
the other.
>There is also no specification, and currently no W3C work item, for
>specifying how an
>author or application programmer could specify an order to the
>various transformations.
>Thus it appears there is a missing specification in the XML activity."
>
Right. There's no standard way to do this, so those of using this
stuff just hook up our own processing to run in the order we want it
to run. That falls apart as soon as tools vendors take it upon
themselves to impose one particular order on us.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
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