Sylvain Wallez wrote: > > IMHO, this example goes strongly against the benefits that blocks want > to bring. The functionnality brought by the 'skin' block is... skinning. > It's not an XSL stylesheet at a particular location. What if someone has > written the killer skin for his site, but this skin requires a > multi-stage pipeline that cannot be represented by a single stylesheet ? > > The contract of a block should be services identified by their URI, and > not files at well-known locations (even if these 'files' are in fact > produced by a pipeline). > > So what about something like : > ... > </map:aggregate> > <map:call resource="block:skin:/site2xhtml"/> > </map:match> > > This call "jumps" to a service provided by the block and its URI is part > of the block's contract. We don't care (because we don't have to) if the > service is implemented by an XSL or by the next-generation transformer. > > What the "jump" does is feed a pipeline in the block with the result of > the current pipeline. The whole pipeline is terminated in the > called block. > > But just as a pipeline can serialize or not depending on if it's an > internal request or not (see SitemapSource), the same service could be > used as a transformation. We could then write something like : > ... > </map:aggregate> > <map:transform type="pipeline" src="block:skin:/site2xhtml"/> > <map:transform type="urlencoder"/> > <map:serialize/> > </map:match> > > By considering blocks as pipeline services, we really achieve true > polymorphism for blocks, because we totally abstract the way their > contracts are implemented. >
I absolutely agree with this, but I have two comments: a) I think a block should also be able to expose resources directly, e.g. images. b) Is it possible to unify map:call and map:transform? Does it make sense? Or is it better to have a different notation to emphasize the different usage? Carsten --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
