RE: Priority and import precedence

> Would it be possible to add a warning message to Saxon, like ambiguous
> rule match, when one template is chosen over another purely by import
> precedence (in fact, isn't this just another kind of ambiguous rule
> match)?  

Interesting idea. It would have to be in some kind of diagnostic mode (a)
because of the performance implications, and (b) because overriding
templates is good and normal practice and you don't want to produce large
numbers of warnings about something that's perfectly respectable.

I actually find that "overriding" bugs are one of my most common errors in
Java that the compiler doesn't catch. It's infuriating that when you
misspell a method name in a subclass, or get the arguments wrong, the method
is just silently ignored. So I can see that in complex XSLT applications,
there might be similar effects.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/