Hi Bob,

>  The only thing that jumped out as a potential issue, which you also
>  highlighted, is the incorporation of XSLT into the language. I'm
>  afraid this is the camel's nose in the tent. Though your use of XSLT
>  in the examples is carefully restricted, leaving the door ajar will
>  invite the full language in and effectively prevent any
>  implementation other than by XSLT. I am concerned that a process
>  that might be performed as a side effect of validation could have
>  overheads that swamp those of validation, itself.
> 
>  My suggestion is to carefully evaluate where you found XSLT useful
>  (as in providing a template capability for error messages) and
>  design your own language around these requirements. Any
>  implementation via XSLT is going to first translate the document
>  into an XSLT stylesheet, anyway, and it will have no trouble
>  translating those elements (back) into XSLT syntax.

Yep; I think these are very reasonable comments. Looking over the test
datatype libraries that I put together, the parts that were useful
were:

  - the ability to create elements and text
  - the ability to define variables
  - the ability to get the "value-of" an XPath expression
  - conditional code (choose/if)

I also used some XSLT-only functions within the XPaths, in particular
format-number(), but that will hopefully be incorporated into XPath
2.0 anyway.

So I think it will be very easy to restrict what's needed in the code
sections to something a lot less burdensome to implementations.

Thanks,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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