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RE: Xpath Question

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Xpath Question
• From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@C...>
• Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 15:58:10 -0400
• In-reply-to: <r02000000-1026-626DFC76BED211D7A0870003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• References: <EB0A327048144442AFB15FCE18DC96C7272CCE@R...>

At 2003-07-25 15:01 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>Then I guess you're saying that the XPath 1.0 model is useless if you
>want a reliably consistent model of a given XML document?
>
>Oh well.

Don't despair for XSLT 1.0, Simon, I believe it is reliably consistent.  To 
summarize points I made in a post a few moments ago, this time without any 
references to any products whatsoever:

(1) Chapter 17 of http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116 states "A 
conforming XSLT processor must be able to use a stylesheet to transform a 
source tree into a result tree as specified in this document."

(2) section 3 of http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116 states "The 
data model used by XSLT is the same as that used by XPath with the 
additions described in this section"

(3) the applicable statements from section 3.4 of 
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116 indicate that when an instance 
is being treated as a source file to build a source node tree and the 
stylesheet does not include any <xsl:strip-space> or <xsl:preserve-space> 
instructions then all text nodes in such source node trees are preserved 
because:

   (a) - the element name of the parent of the text node is in the set of 
whitespace-preserving element names
   (b) - for source documents, the set of whitespace-preserving element 
names is specified by xsl:strip-space and xsl:preserve-space top-level elements
   (c) - initially, the set of whitespace-preserving element names contains 
all element names

I see these statements as reliable and unambiguous.  Looking at XSLT 1.0 I 
don't see any other statements that might conflict with the above.

................ Ken


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G. Ken Holman                mailto:gkholman@C...
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• References:
  • RE: Xpath Question
    • From: "Michael Rys" <mrys@m...>
  • RE: Xpath Question
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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