[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: [good] Question about NS 1.1
James seems to be asking for a some kind of a static type guarantee, where it would be impossible to write an XSLT stylesheet that produced a namespace error. Or where, at least, XSLT could be asked to automatically ensure that its output would have all needed namespace declarations, and the transform writer could be completely unaware of the machinery of prefixes, etc. This would be useful, but unless optional, it would make it harder for people to create stylesheets that produce non-namespaced, or non-xml results. There are even bigger holes in the XSLT type system, such as the ability to emit unescaped markup -- of course those are intended to solve tough problems (or enable quick hacks, depending on your perspective), and so their use is quite clearly marked. There is very interesting work being done on transformation languages that use type checkers to make guarantees about their output. This isn't past the research phase at this point. Practitioners often prefer tools that let them make errors if those errors are the consequence of extra power. Practically, we will see how big a problem it is that one needs to be careful care in creating namespace declarations in transformations. -- David At 2:43 PM +0100 4/12/02, David Carlisle wrote: >At 3:39 PM +0200 4/12/02, james anderson wrote: >> >>given this expression, and given that this expression may itself be the >>result of an arbitrary computation, i cannot predict that a transform >>applied to the expression of a transform will produce a usable result. > >The result of an XSLT transform is entirely deterministic at the level >of input tree to result tree. There is some allowed variability in the >way the input tree can be constructed from an XML file (order of >attributes for example) and there is some similar essentially cosmetic >variability in the way the result may be serialised. > >Given that, I can't see why you should not be able to predict (or even >specify exactly) what the result of any transform will be. -- ------------------------------- David Durand | 12 Bassett St. david.durand@i... | Providence RI, 02903-4628 USA VP, Software Architecture | 401-331-2014 x111 Cell: 401-935-5317 ingenta plc | FAX: 401-331-2015 http://www.ingenta.com/
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