[XML-SIG] Python + XSL

[Paul Prescod]

Adrian Boyko wrote:
> 
> I don't think a new implementations of XSL is the way to go.  I'd rather see
> us making sure that:
> (1) The language definition for XSL allows the stylesheet author to specify
> a scripting language.  I don't have the spec in front of me, but I don't
> think it does.

It doesn't and I wouldn't be surprised if it never does. Web page
designers don't want to require every surfer to install half a dozen XSL
processors for every different languages. Nevertheless, XSL is
straightforwardly translatable into Python and such a tool would be
useful to Python programmers. It wouldn't be "XSL", but we could
probably call it "PyXSL" without getting sued.

It might also be an interesting project to implement a "real" XSL parser
in Python, since Python's features are a superset of ECMAScript's.

> (2) Existing XSL efforts (e.g. MSXSL) hook into their platform's
> language-neutral scripting system (like ASP on Windows hooks into the
> Windows scripting system).

That's possible. A command line switch could change the parser from
"XSL" to "PyXSL".

> (3) Python is available via the scripting system of various platforms (this
> is already the case under Windows).

Unfortunately, Unix doesn't have a "scripting system" in that sense.

 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

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