Re: What's the correct DTD for XSL?

At 12:51 PM 8/2/1999 -0400, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
>That raises the question: what is the correct DTD for XSL?  Would it
explicitly
>include all the attributes of an <fo:block> in an <fo:inline-sequence>
(plus a
>great multitude of similarly situated attributes)?  Or is the question of
>validating an XSLT stylesheet as an XML document simply uninteresting to most
>members of this community?

It's not uninteresting, simply or otherwise :), but the notion of
"validating an XSLT stylesheet" makes sense only if the result tree uses
XSL formatting objects. An overall DTD for XSL -- covering XSLT and the
formatting objects -- is possible, but the question is complicated by the
ability of XSLT to produce result trees in *non*-XSL vocabularies. What you
end up with in such a stylesheet contains elements and attributes from two
different DTDs. About the best you can do with this stylesheet is to test
it for well-formedness. (To my knowledge, there's not yet a validating
parser that's capable of validating against more than one DTD at a time.
For starters, what do you put in the document-type declaration?)

So the answer isn't that it's uninteresting. The answer is that since many
(probably most) XSLT spreadsheets generate (X)HTML result trees, at least
so far, validation isn't even possible.

====================
John E. Simpson
Just XML (ISBN 0-13-943417-8)
Available now from Prentice Hall PTR


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