Re: Co-validating stylesheets?

disco <disco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This is something I had give some thought to, and am actually quite
> curious what other people had to say about it. Obviously one DTD isn't
> powerful enough for this sort of thing, because of the explanation above.
> But the general question of "given DTD A, DTD B, and a stylesheet which
> claims to tranform instances of A into B, can the transformation be
> 'co-validated' against the source and result DTDs" is an interesting
> question...
>
> You would likely have to throw out the possibility of text nodes, but most
> other XSLT functions I can think of are deterministic and predictable in
> how they generate result tree fragments.
>
> What do people think about this?

XSLT has hit the point where it is "Turing complete" so _in general_ doing
this validation is impossible. It is possible to write a tool which will
work most of the time, and complain about specific pieces of the code where
it can't follow the code. Such a tool would be very useful, since _typical_
XSLT code would be verifiable.

I'm not aware of anyone doing any work along these lines, though.

Have fun,

    Oren Ben-Kiki


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