Re: [xml-dev] Serialization of XDM - Use cases / Proposal

["David A. Lee" <dlee@calldei.com>]

Thanks Michael.  In my mind, for this spec,  ease of implementation trumps borrowing from existing specs if you cant in fact reuse existing technology.
e.g from what I can see
  <xsl:sequence select="xs:positiveInteger('5')"/>

Has the advantage of borrowing from existing specs (xslt) but is overweighted by the complexity of implementing the parser for say
    "xs:positiveInteger('5')"

Not only would one have to write a parser for
       <TYPE> '(' value ')'

(not too hard)
But because it is borrowing from existing specs the implication would be that we'd have to parse *anything* that could otherwise be in select="..."
That would require a full blown XPATH 2.0 parser.

Now of course we could refine the spec to limit the subset of XPATH 2.0 which is allowed to be in the select="" to only a small set of lexical elements.
But then we're diverging from the original purpose of borrowing from existing specs which is that they are familiar, we dont have to re-document them, and they mean in this new spec fundamentally what they meant in the spec were borrowing from.

Given that I'm going to suggest atomic values be represented as a new element like
    <atomicValue value="5" type="xs:positiveInteger"/>.    

But try to reuse the other suggested XSLT elements for documents, elements etc.
All in a new namespace .. (because they are not actually the same thing as xsl: even if they are based on it).
I'm a bit on the fence if atomic values should have the value as an attribute or body.
Attributes make sense for small values like the above, but what a very common case of huge text.

<atomicValue value="This is a huge block of text
....
1000000 lines later"  type="xs:string" />


Gives me the impression the value should be in the body.

<atomicValue type="xs:string">This is a huge block of text
....
1000000 lines later</atomicValue>


Could always support both variants :(

David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com  
http://www.calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org
812-482-5224

Michael Kay wrote:

A8BE77371C304F19BEF1624A7E68AB8C@Sealion" type="cite">

The first question I have in mind is how do we parse this.  This one example of Michaels has me a little confused:

    <xsl:sequence select="xs:positiveInteger('5')"/>

This is the proposal for how to represent a typed atomic value.    This is pretty obscure to my novice eyes.  Reading this I wouldn't guess off hand that this means "Atomic value, type xs:positiveInteger, text value '5'". 

 

Well, I think it's merit is that it's familiar syntax and semantics for anyone who knows XSLT 2.0 or wants to go and read the spec. For many purposes, however, a more convenient syntax would be <atomicValue value="5" type="xs:positiveInteger"/>.  


That then leads me to the final question.  Suppose we transform this serialized form "almost an xslt" format, into "real xslt" format, then
run a real XSLT 2.0 parser on it.  How to get the resulting values out ?

Please bear with me as I'm very much a novice at XSLT ... maybe the answer is "obvious".
XSLT 2.0 claims that the result of an XSLT transformation can be a 'set of result trees'.
Thats an XDM sequence . (???)
 

No: XQuery can produce any XDM sequence as output (well, almost any - it can't for example generate unparsed entities); but XSLT can only produce a set of document nodes. You can write an xsl:function to produce any XDM sequence as its result, but you would need a processor-specific way of invoking the function and capturing its result in the external environment.

 

Incidentally, I was reminded of this project in some work with a client yesterday. They are running MarkLogic queries and feeding the result into Saxon, currently via lexical XML (it has to be serialized because it's on a different machine). In this kind of scenario it would be nice to transfer a typed document, but we really don't want a five-fold increase in document size over the lexical XML. Size does matter.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay