Re: Schema-aware validation of XHTML result-document

Your article says


> It is unacceptable that both AltovaXML and Saxon accept illegal
> namespace declarations in the result-document making the XHTML not
> valid,  

and says the same thing in different ways in other places.

I think it's very misleading to use "valid" in two completely different
ways in the same article without prefixing the term to show the meaning
intented.

validation in a schema-aware XSLT system means XSD Schema validation and
if the system reports no errors that gives an assurance that the result
is schema-valid. The extra namespace declarations have no effect on
schema validity (or for that matter on an XHTML rendering agent).

they do mean that the docuemnt is not DTD-valid, but the XSLT spec gves
no guarantees about that. As Michael has said, given that xhtml output
is mainly aimed at targetting xhtml towards legacy browsers that don't
understand xhtml and want to treat it as html, a system could perhaps
make a warning here,, but to characterise it as producing invalid output
after reporting no validation errors is misleading as it masks the fact
that you changed the definition of validity mid sentence. Your example
though uses the xml output method, so there I don't see that there is
anything that you could really do, other than output the pre-validated
tree, as shown earlier.


>  Both AltovaXML and Saxon have forgotten this problem and are not
>  reporting those validation errors.

No, they are using a schema validator and they are not errors to a
schema valdator. There is no provision in XSL to initiate DTD
validation from within the stylesheet.


David