This is the mail archive of the
xsl-list@mulberrytech.com
mailing list .
Re: schema-1 (was something about keys, a long while ago)
I think the spirit of my original proposal has been forgotten as the discussion has drifted, which is natural, so let me reiterate:
1. PSVI aware APIs basically don't exist today. The best we can reasonably expect to do with schemas today is to get a simple boolean answer about an instance document, valid or invalid, and maybe have some default attribute values applied. Any technology that tries to build on top of PSVI and especially types is going to have major problems, simply due to the immaturity of the tools.
2. There are lot of requirements in the XSLT 2.0 requirements that are independent of schemas and the PSVI. These are useful things to add, and can be implemented today.
3. There are lot of requirements in the XSLT 2.0 requirements that are dependent on schemas and the PSVI. These are also useful things to add, but cannot be implemented today.
4. The community does not have a lot of experience with PSVI-based systems yet. Anything we design today is likely to contain significant flaws that will only be obvious in hindsight.
Hence my original proposal: do everything that does not require schemas and PSVI first. Then, when PSVI aware APIs and tools are available and we have some experience with them, do everything that does require schemas. We are lucky in that there really is a pretty clear separation between the two. Most of the non-schema requirements such as grouping and multiple document output are really quite independent of the presence or absence of a schema. It is possible to break this large problem into many smaller chunks and work on them one at a time.
Note especially I am not proposing that we do not add schema support to XSLT eventually, just that we do not do it in the next version of XSLT. The question is really whether we get some of the features we need sooner and the complete set sometime later, or whether we don't get anything until sometime later.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list