Transforming from Jarfiles?!

[Joseph Kesselman <ke...@us.ibm.com>]

The XSL user's mailing list just pointed out that the Java URI support 
recognizes "jar:"  as a meta-scheme for looking inside jarfiles... and 
since Xalan is using their code, that means we should respond correctly to 

things like:
    <xsl:include href="jar:file:///foo/bar.jar!/com/sample/baz.xsl"/>
or similar syntax in command line or API URIs.

I've got mixed opinions on whether we should document that capability. On 
the one hand, it will _probably_ continue to work, _probably_ work in most 

or all Java-based XSLT processors, and could be really useful. On the 
other hand, it's specific to Java and is something of an incidental 
side-effect; it *might* go away if someone decides to work on optimizing 
our I/O capabilities.

Should we publish this tip, with caveats, as a FAQ... or will that cause 
more confusion than it cures, in the long run? Opinions? 

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research