Saxon Frustrations

Hi,

I guess this is a very basic question for this list. If so, my apologies but 
I would appreciate some advice / help. Perhaps my "suffering" will save some 
other list member similar torment. :)

Since I recently purchased Michael Kay's book on XSLT I decided to have a 
first dabble with Saxon. However, to cut a long story short, it won't work. 
At present I am trying to get Saxon to handle the transformation of the 
Hello.xml example on p.17 and on of Michael Kay's book. Hardly high powered 
stuff. :)

Saxon produces nothing - including HTML files of length zero. No HTML on 
screen when run with just hello.xml and hello.xsl. And zero length HTML files 
when I attempt to produce them.

When I used the XML file which included the stylesheet reference the page 
title of the generated HTML page appeared correctly in Internet Explorer but 
the content of the <greeting> tag was nowhere to be seen.

I have checked for all the possible errors I can think of. It was 
straightforward to get the xsl to transform the  XML using e.g. XMLWriter. My 
guess is that the problem with using Saxon is some incompatibility internally 
somewhere between versions. The problem may hinge on namespace declaration. 
Saxon seems to insist on "xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
which is supposedly newer than the mapping which XMLWriter (1.21) uses - 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl". Yet when I use Saxon's version of the mapping 
absolutely nothing is produced.

I am using Saxon 5.3.2 (which doesn't work). The transformation which did 
work used XMLWriter 1.21, IE5.0 with the May 2000 issue of MSXML. I wonder 
whether upgrading to IE5.5 might solve some of my problems but would that 
also solve the non-functionality of Saxon on this trivial piece of code?

Rather than waste more time with this I hope someone can help with a "Oh of 
course that won't work because ..." or a "You need to ...".

If I haven't provided a key piece of information I apologise.

Andrew Watt


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