At 10:32 PM -0600 4/29/02, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
>My argument is that (2) is not strong enough to ban the practice
>entirely. First of all, perhaps it's the same thing that attracts
>me to Python, but I don't think that I as XSLT implementor should be
>playing nanny to the user.
I don't think it's playing nanny to correctly implement the
specifications. I think that if a product is advertised as an XSLT
processor, it's not unreasonable to ask that it not be doing other
things that have nothing to do with XSLT processing. If I want
XInclusion, I'll install and use an XInclude processor. If I don't I
won't. But I certainly don't want my XSLT processor to decide to do
XInclusion for me when I haven't specifically asked for it. That's
playing nanny. I know what I want. The XSLT processor doesn't, except
in so far as my instructions in the stylesheet tell it. When an XSLT
processor does things I haven't specifically told it to do, it is
saying that it knows what's better for my documents than I do. That's
nannyism.
> I shall give them the options, and they can sort it out. It turns
>out that I prefer it that way: I do a lot of hand editing of XML
>documents (Docbook, often) that use XInclude to incorporate other
>sections or source code snippets from other files. I often run use
>XSLT on these documents. In this way, I probably, and I'm not
>exaggerating, use XInclude in the XSLT input source stream once a
>week or more.
>
I use XInclusion more than a dozen times a day in my process chain,
but then sometimes I don't. Sometimes I just process my documents
without resolving the XIncludes. One process does not fit all needs.
>We need a solution to (1), and when we have it, it should offer the
>option to satisfy users such as I am, as well as users who have
>reservations about interposing layers between parsing and XSLT
>processing.
>
Any such processing standard will need to take into account the needs
of different users for different processing chains at different
times. There's no way one canonical processing order will satisfy
everyone. There may need to be a meta-tool that reads the processing
rules for a document and then launches other individual tools in the
specified order.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| 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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| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
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