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At 1:39 PM +0000 5/8/02, jborden@attbi.com wrote:
>I think what this means in practice is that the Infoset
>for better or worse is the only reasonable "standard mapping"
>of an XML document to a tree. XSDL does define a specific
>transform between an Infoset and a "PSVI" and XSLT 2.0 takes
>such a "PSVI" as an input -- so far so good. Do you really
>want to _limit us_ to using XSDL as the only mechanism of
>specifying a "PSVI" i.e. suppose someone writes a perfectly
>good RELAXNG processor that emits a "PSVI", are you saying
>that you want to disallow this?
>
No, I don't want to disallow that. Chaining processes should be
allowed. However, I do want to disallow an XSLT processor from only
operating on the output from such a process, and I want to disallow
it from automatically feeding a genuine XML document into such a
process as part of the source tree construction. If the user chooses
to give the processor, a RELAX NG PSVI as input that's OK. However,
the XSLT processor should not apply a RELAX NG process before
transformation unless the user has asked it to do that.
For my purposes I'm more concerned with what happens in well-formed
XML documents without a schema. If that behavior is well-defined,
then processors are testable and statements like "Processor X adheres
to the XSLT 2.0 specification" and "Processor Y does not conform to
the XSLT 2.0 specification" have meaning.
Schemas do confuse the picture. For that matter, so do DTDs though at
least the XSLT 1.0 specification is clear on how they do. (i.e. you
must use a parser that reads the full DTD and resolves external
entity references.) Now if I had my way, I'd throw schemas and types
out of XSLT2/XPath2 completely; but facing facts given the culture
and structure of the W3C that's not going to happen no matter how
good an idea it is. So given that we have a less than optimal, very
messy, non-layered solution that does involve schemas, how can we
work around the problems this introduces?
I suspect something similar is needed to how DTDs and their messy
interaction with the data model is handled in XSLT 1.0. An XSLT 2.0
processor which encounters a document that uses xsi:schemaLocation
and xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation attributes must apply the relevant
schema before processing. That is, it must use the schema to insert
default attribute values and default elements. In the event of a
conflict between the schema and the DTD, pick one in the spec. I
don't really care which as long as it's consistent. (That's an edge
case anyway.) If the schema reference is not available or is
syntactically incorrect, then the transform should fail, just as it
does today when the DTD is not available.
An XSLT 2.0 processor which encounters a document that does not use
xsi:schemaLocation and xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation attributes must
not apply any schemas.
Processors may (but are not required to) giver users/developers an
option to change the above behaviors. For instance, an API call could
be made to say "Use this schema" or "don't use any schema at all"
However, the default behavior absent explicit requests otherwise must
be as described above.
OK. That covers the W3C XML Schema Language. What about others? We
should handle them similarly with one key difference. Processors may
choose to support the application of a RELAX NG or other schema
language schema to the document, along with appropriate application
of default values, types, and similar things. However, this ability
must be turned off by default, and should be turned on only at
explicit user request. Of course you could use this strategy for the
W3C XML Schema Language too, if you prefer. That's more consistent
and more fair, but I suspect those users who use W3C schemas would
prefer to have schema parsing be the default.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/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.cafeconleche.org/ |
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