RE: [transquery-discuss] Transquery use of Saxon, extensions

From: Evan Lenz (elenz@xyzfind.com)
Date: Tue Dec 04 2001 - 17:36:30 CET


Though the TransQuery demo uses EXSLT extensions in places, it only uses
them in alternatives to 100% XSLT 1.0 solutions. This is to help address
XSLT's viability as a query language. EXSLT is a good portable tool, but
it's provisional and, by definition, nonstandard.

TransQuery itself does not use or rely on extensions. TransQuery
implementors are also free to support EXSLT (or any other extensions), but
this is an orthogonal concern to TransQuery support. Remember that
TransQuery implementations are just XSLT processors that provide a special
meaning to the {http://www.xmlportfolio.com/transquery}input name. But if we want to be
really picky about definitions, XSLT processors aren't usually just XSLT
processors; they usually ship with external things like an XML parser
(AElfred in Saxon's case) and a parameter-binding mechanism, sometimes even
an API (such as JAXP). A TransQuery "implementor" is only concerned with
this external machinery. This is a very important point, because TransQuery
is not about extending XSLT. It's only about using a particular name for an
existing construct (top-level parameters) to have a special meaning.

Evan Lenz

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bryan Rasmussen [mailto:bry@itnisk.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 1:19 AM
> To: transquery-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [transquery-discuss] Transquery use of Saxon, extensions
>
>
>
> Most of the Transquery examples I saw on the demo site would have run with
> any processor, but I did note there were a couple that used Saxon
> extensions. Now Saxon happens to be my favorite processor, xalan and msxml
> 4.0 running in a tie for second place, but I suppose that if
> extensions are
> used in Transquery implementations they should be exslt, although for the
> proof of concept that the demo site is I think it's fine using Saxon.
> Any opinions there?
> One reason I ask is currently the exsl group are discussing their regex
> extension, making it compatible with regex as used in xml schema.
> Jeni Tennison posted the following yesterday
> " So I think that if we adopt XML Schema regular expressions we have to
> decide:
>
> - do we introduce ^ and $?
> - do we support non-global matches?
> - do we support case-insensitive matches?
> - do we introduce non-capturing matches?
>
> My vote would be not to add anything to XML Schema regular
> expressions, to have them always case insensitive and always global."
>
>
>
>
>



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