New Javascript parser and TinyXSL
Cyril
Jandia has announced
an ECMAScript Parser for "almost" XML, ESPX, and TinyXSL, an XSLT like "mini-language" for performing simple
transformations. These programs provide limited XML/XSLT support to ECMAScript compliant parsers.
Even though
the announcement was sent to the sml-dev mailing list, ESPX supports
a subset of XML much larger than Minimal-XML, and includes attributes, mixed
content, comments and CDATA sections. The main restriction compared to XML 1.0 is that
document type definitions (internal or external) are ignored. Namespaces
in XML 1.0 aren't supported either. The EPSX API is inspired by the DOM.
ESPX
appears then to be an attempt to go as far as is practical to provide a robust
parser written in Javascript, which could be used for XML applications on browsers
lacking XML support.
TinyXSL extends
the same idea to transformations, without trying to be an XSLT subset, and choosing
a set of element names different from those of XSLT to avoid any confusion
between the two languages.
TinyXSL
doesn't rely on XPath expressions, but uses access to the
underlying pseudo-DOM defined by ESPX, allowing instructions such as:
<txsl:when
test="self.attributes[`@xml:lang`]==`fr-FR`">
A demonstration
is available on Jandia's ESPX page.
Jandia acknowledges that there are
performance issues:
...for documents above 36kb,
you must be aware that the parsing/tree building durations currently
experienced are simply not acceptable (more than 2 seconds).
He makes optimization
the number one priority for further developments -- followed by namespaces
support, a SAX-like version, and improvements to TinyXSL.
Related
stories:
Demo link dead (Mario - 21:52, 19 Oct 2003) The demo link is dead.
http://www.mariocarbonell.com Re: New Javascript parser and TinyXSL (th - 23:12, 16 Apr 2003) ergreg Re: New Javascript parser and TinyXSL (Dan Brickley - 20:45, 1 Feb 2001) So I'll leave it to Jan Grant to send round a proper announcement when its ready, but since it's so relevant to this article here's a pointer to Jan's new RDF parser in Javascript: http://ilrt.org/discovery/demos/xjg/ Re: New Javascript parser and TinyXSL (Rodney Reid - 06:53, 1 Feb 2001) I couldn't get the sample listed to work off the bat in Netscape 4.08 and IE 6.0 beta 2 on a pc, but the idea is great. I downloaded the javascript libraries and will be toying around with this soon!
...Rodney |