2.7.10 Syntax: add an AVT @value attribute to options, parameters, and variables

[ndw]

XProc 1.0 offers relatively few default behaviors, requiring instead that pipelines specify every construct fully. User experience has demonstrated that this leads to very verbose pipelines and has been a constant source of complaint. XProc 2.0 will introduce a variety of syntactic simplifications as an aid to readability and usability, including but not limited to:

Add an AVT value attribute to options, parameters, and variables (to be used instead of select)

[ndw]

On further reflection, I'm not sure this is a good idea. There's no parallel in XSLT, for example, and I've never heard anyone complaining about it. Seems to me that it could be quite confusing.

[rdeltour]

If I may bring my user point of view: a place where I think AVTs would be really handy is in options syntactic shortcut attributes, in order to reduce the verbosity of p:with-option children.

For instance:

<p:add-attribute attribute-name="href" match="*">
    <p:input port="source">
      <p:inline>
        <c:request method="get"/>
      </p:inline>
    </p:input>
    <p:with-option name="attribute-value"
      select="concat('http://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?action=query&amp;titles=',
             encode-for-uri(.),
             '&amp;format=xml&amp;prop=extracts')" />
</p:add-attribute>

becomes

<p:add-attribute attribute-name="href" match="*" attribute-value="http://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?action=query&amp;titles={encode-for-uri(.)}&amp;format=xml&amp;prop=extracts">
  <p:input port="source">
    <c:request method="get"/>
  </p:input>
</p:add-attribute>

(ok, I cheat by using the inline syntax shortcut already ;)

Of course, the real issue there is that you lose backward compatibility with XProc 1.0...

Otherwise, for p:variable or p:with-option, I agree that an AVT attribute wouldn't bring a lot to the existing select attributes (especially thx to the new XPath 3.0 concat operator) and would be more confusing than useful. As for parameters it basically depends on how they're handled in 2.0.

[ndw]

There's no question of doing AVTs in shortcut options (and possibly other places). There's a separate issue for that, #33. That's absolutely required. This issue is really just about a value attribute parallel to select and I find I don't have much enthusiasm for it.

[rdeltour]

There's no question of doing AVTs in shortcut options (and possibly other places). There's a separate issue for that, #33.

Oh, sorry I missed that one.

This issue is really just about a value attribute parallel to select and I find I don't have much enthusiasm for it.

👍 Meh too

[ndw]

At the 25 March telcon, we decided to close this issue without action. http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2015/03/25-minutes.html