Solving the delay in W3C Schema-aware XSLT 2 tools

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

Good morning, all,

Last night I figured out how we can successfully delivery a W3C 
Schema-aware set of demonstrative stylesheets in FPSC using the finalized 
and standardized XSLT 1 without having to await the (1) finalization of 
XSLT 2 and (2) implementation of a W3C Schema-aware XSLT 2.  Today there is 
a prototype XSLT 2 (Saxon) but it is subject to the standardization of XSLT 
2 and it is not (yet) W3C Schema aware.

In my work last night exposing the effect of W3C Schema default attributes 
in the processing of an XML instance, I found a set of invocation 
parameters for Xerces C++:

     http://xml.apache.org/xerces-c/index.html

One of the included utilities is "DOMPrint" that builds the DOM tree 
according to the W3C Schema and then outputs the serialization of that tree:

    http://xml.apache.org/xerces-c/domprint.html

I figure the combination of properties needed to engage full W3C schema 
processing is:

T:\ubl>domprint -n -s -f -wddc=off

Usage:
     DOMPrint [options] <XML file>

This program invokes the DOM parser, and builds the DOM tree.
It then asks the DOMWriter to serialize the DOM tree.
Options:
     -e          create entity reference nodes. Default is no expansion.
     -v=xxx      Validation scheme [always | never | auto*].
     -n          Enable namespace processing. Default is off.
     -s          Enable schema processing. Default is off.
     -f          Enable full schema constraint checking. Defaults is off.
     -wenc=XXX   Use a particular encoding for output. Default is
                 the same encoding as the input XML file. UTF-8 if
                 input XML file has not XML declaration.
     -wfile=xxx  Write to a file instead of stdout.
     -wscs=xxx   Enable/Disable split-cdata-sections.      Default on
     -wddc=xxx   Enable/Disable discard-default-content.   Default on
     -wflt=xxx   Enable/Disable filtering.                 Default off
     -wfpp=xxx   Enable/Disable format-pretty-print.       Default off
     -wbom=xxx   Enable/Disable write Byte-Order-Mark      Default off
     -?          Show this help.

   * = Default if not provided explicitly.

The parser has intrinsic support for the following encodings:
     UTF-8, USASCII, ISO8859-1, UTF-16[BL]E, UCS-4[BL]E,
     WINDOWS-1252, IBM1140, IBM037.


T:\ubl>

What I now plan to do for UBL FPSC 1.0 is pass all instances to be 
formatted *through* DOMPrint before processing with XSLT 1.0.  This will 
"massage" the input instance with the defaulted attributes defined by W3C 
Schema.  Then, by using XSLT 1.0, any variances and changes to XSLT 2.0 
will not impact the efficacy of the FPSC deliverables.

This does, however, burden any implementation with obtaining and utilizing 
DOMPrint, but there are already implementations for AIX, HP, Solaris, Linux 
and Windows:

     http://xml.apache.org/dist/xerces-c/stable/

If anyone objects to this or has further improvement suggestions, please 
speak up.

Thanks!

...................... Ken

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G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
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