Re: [xml-dev] The spirit of XML (was RE: [xml-dev] Re: I can XInclude where I [expletive deleted] wantto)

Man, threads develop quickly on XML-DEV.

> The XSLT data model supports source trees and result trees that correspond
> to any external general parsed entity, not just well-formed XML documents.
> I'm still waiting to see an XSLT processor that comes with a parser that
> supports this (someone please point me to one if it exists). All of the XSLT
> processors I know of, if they come with a parser, come only with an XML
> parser, but clearly more than just an XML parser is needed to support the
> full range of input. I want to be able to access the EGPE source tree like
> any XML document source tree, e.g. on the command-line. That way, I can
> reliably do pipes of transformations mixed in with other kinds of
> transformations, taking full advantage of XSLT's closed data model. And I
> assume this code has been written, as it's an important subprocedure in XML
> parsing.

This is a good point, and something I've often come close to implementing in 4XSLT , because I've occasionally needed it myself.  Ditto the ability to parse an EPE and get a DOM DocumentFragment object.

It actually wouldn't be too hard to do: 4Suite uses expat for non-validating parse, and all we'd have to do is provide a flag which causes ExternalEntityParserCreate to be invoked rather than ParserCreate (or whatever the precise function names are).  IIRC, we still need to set up a fake top-level parser to satisfy expat, but shouldn't be much sweat.

Your post might be the prodding I need to finally do it.

Of course, it's not just a matter of parsers, eh?  I know the basis of TransQuery is that one can have the XML database look sort of like an oversized EPE whereas each top-level node represents a separate document in the database, right?


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                           Fourthought, Inc.
           http://fourthought.com
http://4Suite.org                     http://uche.ogbuji.net
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XML, The Model Driven Architecture, and RDF @ XML Europe - http://www.xmleurope.com/2002/kttrack.asp#themodel