Colin Paul Adams wrote:
Abel> surely it will, esp. because most PHP programmers write for the
Abel> internet and this usually requires ecmascript/javascript
Abel> skills: it is familiar already.
But is it useful?
What will the programer be able to do that (s)he cannot do with
xsl:function?
If using the host language, I can envisage various answers, but Javascript?
One thing that I dearly miss from the XSLT spec is a way to do a POST
request (i.e., retrieve a SOAP or JSON XML document through web
services). With JavaScript one has the ability to use XmlHTTPRequest
which can be used for issuing a POST to the server and returning an XML
object.
Another thing you can do is check the existence of an external resource,
i.e., if you use unparsed-text-available() the function will fully parse
the text and will only fail or succeed. It won't say, for instance, that
the UTF-8 contains invalid characters. I happen to work a lot with
external resources. Knowing the difference between the availability of a
URL and the unparsability of a URL is of great value to me.
And I'm sure there are other things that cannot be done through
xsl:function. I.e., try to process a ZIP file will be rather hard
(meaning: impossible) in XSLT because of the � characters.
-- Abel Braaksma
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