Re: Xinclude with Xalan 2.4

>  But I see it like this - a stylesheet is 
> applied to an XML document.  If the document declares, in effect "I 
> contain this other document here.xml" then it seems that it would be 
> implied that anyone wishing to apply a stylesheet would, of necessity, 
> have to first parse the xml and do the include of here.xml.  Thus, I 
> would think that XInclude should always precede any application of a 
> stylesheet.

XSLT is an XML application so naturally depends on the results of XML
parsing. So entity expansion happens during teh parse, before XSLT.

Some of the earliest implementations of Xinclude were done _as_ XSLT
stylesheets matching the elements in the xinclude namespace, clearly
this processing happens after (or rather, during) XSLT processing.

Xinclude is another XML application so also depends on the results of
parsing. Especially as Xinclude is a later specification than XSLT
you shouldn't expect an XSLT processor to know anything about this at
all, just as you shouldn't expect an Xinclude processor to know about
XSLT, or Xforms or MathML. You may find some applications
that can parse, do XInclude processing and XSLT transforms, in which
case you have some flexibility in whch order things happen (except
parsing will always come first in a native XML application). 

David

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