Re: Variables and HTML

  OK, thanx Michael and David - you both are a complementing answering machine
  :-)

Note that Michael is an editor and WG member so his answers are
informed, I'm neither and my answers are guesses:-)


  That leaves me with the question why it is not encouragable to couple
  transformers and serializers... may we assume that serializers are kept out
  of the spec's domain is because serializers are too system specific?


See how one of the faq's of the microsoft implementation is that
settings on xsl:output are ignored. the reason being that msxsl has
output a DOM which has then been (possibly) further processed and then
finally serialised using DOM  methods. XSLT rather encourages this
tree-in tree-out view of the XSLT transform process but if you to output
a tree then currently (and perhaps always) you don't get to control the
final serialisation. That's not necessarily bad, just a consequence of 
a pipelineing approach to the transformation, but it does mean that
essentially everything about serialisation in XSLT is slightly second
class as the spec wants to allow conforming systems that never serialise
but always just pass on a result tree as a tree.

David


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