Adam Turoff wrote:
>  One of Joshua's comments got me thinking.  Which is *more* broken:
>  SOAP or XSLT?  That is, is it a misfeature of XSLT that document()
>  can't send SOAP requests, or that idempotent SOAP requests don't
>  use a simple GET?  I ask that rhetorically not to ascribe blame, but
>  to understand the issue more fully.
>  
>  That leads to another question: is the lack of POST/PUT/DELETE
>  support with XSLT simply an oversight?  Or is there a well thought
>  out reason why XSLT's document() function is limited to GET requests?
>  (And should this discussion be added to the XSLT 2.0 REC?)

It wasn't really accurate to say that document() is limited to GET requests.

A URI in general doesn't convey the retrieval mechanism with any more
granularity than the scheme ('http', 'ftp', etc.), and that's only when the
URI is a URL. Remember it might be a URN. The idea is not to convey how to
retrieve the resource, but *which* resource.

If you just think of what a URI actually is, and think of the URI passed into
the document function as being an XML document's ID/name, rather than
necessarily being its address/location, it should be more clear why XSLT is
wise to leave the retrieval mechanism, and rules for URI resolution, up to the
implementation.

"How do you obtain a resource that is identified by a URI that is an HTTP
URL?" might as well be "How do you obtain a resource that is obtained by a URI
that is a URN that looks like urn:go-get-doc-number-12345?"  as far as
document() is concerned; it doesn't care, and there's technically no
obligation to support *any* URI resolution. For that matter, an XSLT processor
is allowed to abort processing and raise an error if for any reason the
document function can't obtain the resource or produce a root node from it! :)

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________________
  mike j. brown                   |  xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/
  denver/boulder, colorado, usa   |  resume: http://skew.org/~mike/resume/

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