Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
NO! that's the beauty
echo "application/xml" > /document/@mime-type
Voila' ;-)
Actually, even better
echo "xml" > /document/@syntax echo "text/xhtml" > /document/@mime-type
because MIME is getting it all wrong with this stupid +xml by mixing concerns between the syntax and the semantics.
Do you see the potential?
The obvious question is what happens when you try to do an xpath expression on a file that is not XML. Perhaps the filesystem module would know enough to check for <?xml version="1.0"?> ?
ARRRRRGGGG!
Lots of potential though :) Maybe you could tie a service to a virtual device. Like /dev/xupdate or /dev/xalan, and output to > STDOUT?
That's much better talking, bro ;-)
More RTing:
Imagine having an XSL processor in the kernel:
You could "execute" .xsl files, bypassing having to run a processor manually.
prompt$ page2html.xsl < input.xml > output.html
making the above line work would be a piece of cake.
You can make (just about) anything executable: see documentation/java.txt in the kernel about making .class files executable. For .class files it's based on the CAFEBABE header - xsl is - roughly speaking - just around the corner when you get the hex equivalent of <?xml version="1.0"?> :)
http://www.google.com/search?q=xmlfs <-- people have thought about this before :)
Borrowing the pipeline concept from Cocoon:
prompt$ cat input.xml | page2foo.xsl | foo2bar.xsl | bar2html.xsl > output.html
One could even invent files which are actually transformation pipelines -- ones which you might not be able to directly edit (or maybe be able to edit a transformation in the middle):
prompt$ make-virtual-file-pipeline virtual.xml --generator=input.xml --tranformers=page2foo.xsl;foo2html.xsl --serialize=text/xml
Now you can just go
prompt$ cat virtual.xml
And get the output of the pipeline defined above, which you can then link to other pipelines, etc.
It's no wonder that this all fits in very well with what Cocoon does, since Cocoon is patterned after this concept. I'm sure if I stew on this concept enough I'll come up with more ideas and uses.
Tony
