See also: IRC log
<scribe> Scribe: Norm
<scribe> ScribeNick: Norm
Date: 05 Jan 2006
http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2006/01/05-agenda.html
Accepted.
http://www.w3.org/2005/12/22-xproc-minutes.html
Accepted
Any regrets for next week? None given.
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35125/TP2006/
Any discussion of iteration?
ht: I came up with a use case
this week: using a pipeline to construct a soap message, send
it off, the result containing multiple instances of document
which are in turn used to construct soap messages and send them
out.
... This pipeline doesn't produce a new document, it just
iterates over some results from soap messages.
richard: This is iteration over multiple subtrees in the same document. Last week we were talking about iteration over multiple documents.
ht: Indeed, but it raises the question of whether we want to think about an abstraction over the kinds of things that go through pipelines.
Alex: ht's example is very much
like a lot of things I do. What I've been doing is treating the
elements that match as their own sub-documents or just
documents and the steps in the processes just treat them like
documents that could have come in separately.
... And then on the sub-document I run a pipeline over
that.
... The abstraction that I'm using is a sequence of
documents.
ht: Do we want at this early
stage to go from a simple view that says a pipeline has a
document that goes through it to one that has a sequence of
documents flowing through it.
... harder to explain, to understand, and slightly harder to
implement.
<ht> ht: ... but more powerful
Erik: the way we do this with
XPL, as an example, is to just provide a facility for iteration
that allows for extraction from a node from a document using
XPath.
... We can select //something, for example, and then iterating
over each of the elements returned.
... this is a solution that doesn't require a sequence of
documents.
Alex: But aren't they really virtually there?
Erik: Well, yes, but it's
iteration over a subset of the pipeline without adding a
sequence type to the pipeline language.
... The concept of sequence in XPL is limited to iteration
Alex: Both XSLT2 and XQuery
support sequences and we are, I assume, going to want to
support them.
... I have another component that can produce an aggregate. I
think the idea of sequence as a primary thing in the language
is very important. Architecturally, it lets us have a clear
view at the language level of two different types of
components, one that can process a sequence and another that
only supports a single document (compare XSLT 2 and XSLT 1). We
could define the semantics of how you process a sequence with a
component that only handles a single doc
ument.
Richard: You've suggested here that there are some components that understand sequences. Then a pipeline controller could know what to do with a sequence. This raises the question then of whether you're allowed to write components that are allowed to maintain state between the documents passed through them.
Alex: I can see that as a real
concern. XQuery does maintain a state over the whole sequence.
It seems like its component-dependent.
... As soon as you have a component that requires the whole
document, streaming stops. I think the same thing would hold
true for XSLT 2 or XQuery with respect to sequences.
... When I deal with sequences I use the subtree-selection and
that's my iteration thing for producing a sequence that I then
iterate a pipeline over.
richard: There's also the question of what you do with the output of some sort of an iteration component. Merging them back into a single doucment might be sufficient.
Alex: Yes, there's a real issue
here with how you deal with sequences and components that don't
know what do with sequences
... I deal with sequences and the receiver either knows what to
do or it HCFs.
richard: Your point about XSLT
having to buffer up the whole document seems to me to be a good
argument in favor of sequences instead of always packaging
things into one document.
... OTOH, in some cases allowing for streaming within processes
may cause that problem. Rather than having an explicit
sequence, you could have a component that takes a packaged up
document and runs a process on subtrees with in it.
Alex: one of the things I use all the time is the ability to scope an XSLT to process only a subtree.
<richard> correction: streaming might *solve* the problem
Alex: The way I deal with this is
to say that the baseline is always streaming and if you need
the whole doucment there's a little adapter that lets you build
the whole document.
... streaming and dealing with subtrees is really critical to
me.
ack, ht
<Zakim> ht, you wanted to struggle with the difference between iteration vs. dataflow
ht: I just want to mention for
future reference that part of the problem here arises from
different models: one perspective is the programming language
perspective, an xml scripting language, in which context
talking about iteration makes great sense. But another
perspective is data flow. In data flow, there isn't any
iteration, there's just data.
... They're duals: the dual of iteration in data flow is
sequences. There's a tradeoff in both implementation and
conceptual terms between these two ways of thinking about these
things
Alex: We should try to write a declaritive language that doesn't force that choice, either should be possible.
ack
<Zakim> ht, you wanted to mention the tension between streaming and error recovery
ht: Streaming is great and often what you want to do, but I think it's worth noting that once you try to provide gaurantees about error protection, there's a tension between knowning that one step has finished without error before the next starts.
Alex: yes, there's definitely tension there. Maybe there are requirements here we should articulate.
richard: We could say that if you want synchronous error handling you have to add a component to support that.
Norm observes that we have a few requirements documents out there
Alessandro summarizes the requirements that he posted yesterday.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-processing-model-wg/2006Jan/0002.html
<Zakim> richard, you wanted to mention the tension between streaming and multiple inputs
richard: If you have streaming
inputs then the question of multiple inputs becomes somewhat
difficult. SAX doesn't really work for multiple inputs if you
have independent streams.
... Another way to do it is to consider one input the principle
input and the other inputs to be the explicit actions of the
processes
<Zakim> ht, you wanted to be nervous about 'while'
ht: I think the matter of turing
completeness can be overplayed and it's hard to come up with
useful tools that aren't vulnerable to various DOS attacks, but
"while" has properties that none of the other constructs have
in that regard and I've only recently come up with a case where
maybe I'd like to have it.
... I think "while" wants to be in some sort of "maybe"
category IMO.
<Zakim> Norm, you wanted to ask what "for each" means at the pipeline level and to ask for more detail about "fallback behavior"
<Alessandro> Alessandro agrees with ht
Alex: It's a maybe but it is useful. It would be nice to have a mechanism for extending the language that might allow others to implement something like "while".
<richard> can ht and alex give examples of what they mean by "while"
ht: I think that's right. It's one thing to say that there's a component that uses "while", it's entirely another to say that you can change the syntax of the language to put a while scope around a component.
Alex: To my pipleline language, everything is a pipeline step.
<ht> richard, e.g. run the output of this step/pipeline back in as its input while some xpath is satisfied
Alex: Do we have a language with iteration and conditionals etc. or do we just have a collection of components some of which implement those features.
Norm asks Alessandro what he meant by "fallback behavior"
Alessandro: I was thinking of "try/catch/finally" sort of construct
<ht> norm, 'catch' is the fallback in a try/catch construction
<MSM> (except without the ability to throw)
<alexmilowski> Example of while: translate an ATOM entry feed with "next" elements into one large atom feed
ht describes his "while" example from IRC above.
richard: In languages like C and Java, while and for are just minor syntactic variants. Here they're quite different.
<alexmilowski> The next element points to another chunk of the feed. The result of following the feed next element may be another feed with another next element.
ht: Right. We've been talking about for-each not a general purpose for.
richard: Alex you were suggesting that all the control structures could be components, is that right?
Alex: Yes
richard: Right. So that provides completely general extensibility in control strucutre but has the downside of having the control structure opaque in the sense that it uses any non-standard control structures. It's harder to build tools to display the structure.
Alex: My pipeline language itself
is really defined by the components. A component has an
element, the element has a syntax and may specify a subpipeline
that it runs
... But it does cause problems for authoring tools.
<Zakim> ebruchez, you wanted to mention that extensibility is good, but core syntax has to remain clear
Erik: I just wanted to say that
it would be nice if it's extensible, but we need to have a
clear core syntax.
... I don't have any particular opinion at this moment, but we
should try to keep the syntax simple for the core features.
Alex: One example of a language that's proved to be very exensible is Ant. It has a core set of concepts, but everything else is an extension.
Erik: Yes, I understand that. If everything is working with infosets then that might be very possible.
Norm suggests that we begin writing a requirements documents
Alex: concurs
Norm asks for an editor
Alex: I'm willing.
<Jeni> Rui also wrote some requirements at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-processing-model-wg/2006Jan/0000.html
Norm agrees to help Alex get started up
ht: Is there anyone who can explain NVDL
Norm: NVDL sent us an explicit list of requirements.
Its task is validation of mixed-namespace documents, by taking your document and producing a lot of different subtrees
an HTML + MathML document may turn / will turn into an HTML document and a MathML fragment.
The HTML goes to an HTML validator, the MathML goes to a mathML validator.
<ht> HST notes DTD validation adds attributes too. . .
And at the end, they want to be able to stitch things together again at the end.
alexmilowski: pipelines can certainly do that, but what a crazy way to do it.
Norm: you are able to insert stub elements, to prevent the equation element in the parent document from being empty.
[Docbook example]
<ht> HST believes NVDL also gives you the ability to specify, for each fragment, what static resources, e.g. DTDs, Schemas, to use
alexmilowski: why not just ... ?
Norm: the idea is to allow this to work without your having to change the individual schemas.
alexmilowski: an interesting use case: what if you have multiple validators for the equation, and they say different things?
alexmilowski: even if I wouldn't do validation that way, it's still a useful and interesting use case.
<ht> HST hopes the minutes will show Alex's suggestion about infoset annotation in general, and PSVI validity annotation in particular
<Zakim> ebruchez, you wanted to quickly talk about NVDL
Erik: NVDL has some pretty well defined use cases to explain why they do it that way
<Zakim> richard, you wanted to mention issues of dividing and recomposing a document in complicated ways
<ht> The PSVI issue is, roughly, the question of _what_ flows through the pipeline -- serialised XML documents, 'vanilla' XML infosets, arbitrary infosets, . . .
richard: I wanted to contrast
this problem with the simpler case of passing small parts of a
document through some othe rprocess and then reassmbling
them.
... In this case the depth of nesting of structure is
arbitrary. So either you need a component that can decompose a
document this way or you need the flow of the pipeline to be
controlled by the hierarchy of the document.
... That's a much more dynamic kind of pipeline than we've
considered before.
<ht> Concretely, will the pipeline language support some standard way for a pipeline step which follows an XML Schema validation step to access the [validity] and [validation attempted] properties of items in the infoset. . .
None.
ADJOURNED