RE: Types and Context

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Jeni Tennison wrote:
>
> Hi Jonathan,
>
> > As I've said, consider the 'this:person' QName a convenient
> > shorthand for a pattern "mother|father" sort of like:
> >
> >         <xsl:template match="&this.person;">
> >                 ...
> >         </xsl:template>
> >
> > so, true, one needs to edit the pattern for maintainance sake, but
> > similarly one needs to edit the schema.
>
> Yes.  If you use an entity then you have to edit the stylesheet and
> the schema; if you have a type-checking mechanism, you only have to
> edit the schema.  My point is that as an XSLT application developer, I
> could write a stylesheet that people would not have to touch even if
> they extended/amended the schema.
>

actually no. the entities can be defined in an external DTD subset. only
this would need to be edited to add an element to the 'this.person' pattern,
but this is only an example to demonstate the ability to do this with XML
1.0.

To be clear about this, what I have suggested can be done _today_ with
todays tools. There is no need for XSLT/XPath 2.0. True, an extension XSLT
function would be very helpful, but that hardly ought be a complete version
increment on XPath itself.

-Jonathan