Re: [xsl] ANNOUNCE: Petition to withdraw xsl:script from XSLT 1.1

[Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com>]

At 16:18 01/03/2001 -0500, Clark C. Evans wrote:
>Ok.  However, the use-by-reference is still language specific
>which, IMHO, breaks portability.  From the appendix:
> [snip]
>It is very clear to me that the above stylesheet will work
>if and *only* if the the XSLT processor has built-in java
>capabilities.  So, although you may be right about not 
>"embedding Java", this is close enough to the same concern, 
>it is an "embedded Java package name".
>
>I'd like to see instead a module based extension facility
>that is not language dependent. 

Precisely. Tieing an extension to a language in which it is implemented is
simply evil. XML is in part about interoperability isn't it ? Look at what
the Cocoon and AxKit folks are doing for instance. They're defining common
vocabularies for web applications that can be used accross languages. That
simplifies a lot of things, and good ideas can be easily reused.

We already have extension-element-prefixes so that all extensions can
happen. What is needed is agreement between implementors on the interface
that extension modules would need to expose. I don't care about how modules
would be located and installed (though having the extension namespace uri
point to an RDDL document describing how they can be gotten is definitely a
good idea) or if the implementation would provide for automatic loading
from a distant location (which is a bad idea security wise, but is
nevertheless available in xsl:script). That's implementation specific.

My quarrel with xsl:script is that it *immediately* ties an extension to an
implementation language. This implies either that all implementations will
have to support the same (set of) languages and thus resort to the usual
LCD of programming languages (ecmascript) or that stylesheet authors will
have to include xsl:scripts of equivalent functionality in several
different languages with every stylesheet that they want to be portable.
That's just insane.

-- robin b.
Design a system that even an idiot will be able to use, and only an idiot
will want to use it.