Why I’ve Been Busy

November 6th, 2007 by dlove

My apologies to all of the Mugshot fans out there. I haven’t been keeping up with the builds lately, but for good reason. If any of you out there are in the Rochester, NY area, my thesis defense at the Rochester Institute of Technology is now scheduled. The announcement follows…

Alternate Syntax for XSLT

David Love

http://www.cs.rit.edu/~dpl1926/

November 15, 2007

2:00pm

GCCIS Room 3000

Advisor: Dr. Axel-Tobias Schreiner

Reader: Dr. James Heliotis

Observer: Dr. Stanislaw Radziszowski

Abstract:

XSLT is a transform language for XML that is defined over XML. In other words, XSLT is a language that performs transforms on XML documents, and XSLT programs are themselves XML documents. While XSLT is by nature a functional language, its definition as an XML application obfuscates this fact. Previous research projects have taken the XML-Infoset and provided an alternate syntax in the form of S-expressions, along with providing languages to perform transformations of the new representation in manners similar to that of XSLT.
For example, SXML / SXSLT performs this function by embedding said languages in Scheme.

XLove applies modern principles of object-oriented design, namely design patterns, to this problem. Xl is an alternate syntax for the XML-Infoset. It maintains a clear distinction between attributes and elements (while having a concise notation for namespaces). The syntax is built into a representation over the Document Object Model by observers responding to parsing events.
Xlt is an alternate syntax for XSLT designed to emphasize the functional nature of the language. A set of visitors transforms the input Document Object Model tree into an output tree by mapping the Xlt abstract syntax tree to XSLT. The resultant document is a valid XSLT program over the Document Object Model which can than be directly executed or output as an XML file.

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