Re: [xsl] Using Xlink and XPointer with XSLT

[Jens Schäfers <schaefers at adesso dot de>]

Hi Daniel,


> Ouch ... some good but hard questions have to be asked from time to time ...

:-)

>   Let's try to be precise:
>      [...] You will need to put some XLink logic within your XSLT program but adding direct support in XSLT wasn't possible and I doubt it's actually a good 
>      idea (keep thing generic is better IMHO).
>    - about using XPointer, well once you have detected an URI Reference in one of the document constructs (be it XLink or something else) the only way to 
>      process the refernced resource is to use document()

The problem is that I don't want to write a whole new XSLT processor.
I'm using Xalan2 as XSL processor and I thought it would be enough to
write some XSLT stylesheets. But if I get it right you mean that there
is no way in XSLT itsself to use XLink/XPointer for referring to
external documents similar to the ID/IDREF construct inside a document.
Then document()-function must do (I must admit I hadn't thought of that)
though IMHO it would be more elegant if you could use XLink/XPointer in
this situation.

>      However if you use only a name as the fragment identifier then the semantic can be considered 'stable' since just for HTML->XHTML compatibility a fragment 
>      identifier consisting of a Name should have the simple semantic of locating the element carrying the ID of that name (i.e. the equivalent of the XPath 
>      expression "id(name)").

That will do for my purposes. If I can't use it for XSLT processing
XPointer will still provide a way to store a reference to the external
element in the XML main document.

>  The next question is 'how many XSLT processors support this', and the only answer I know is that it is not currently in libxslt (which is a shame since I have 
>  an XPointer implementation in libxml and doing it would probably amount to less than one hour of work).

I don't know what XSLT processor (or library) you're referring to. We're
using java-based tools here so there are the usual suspects: Xalan and
Saxon. I didn't find anything about the level of XLink/XPointer support
in this tools. But I'll use t

Thank you very much for your explanations and the hint to document()!

Jens

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