Re: question on random numbers for browser XSLT

<xsl:template name="rand">
<xsl:param name="scale" select="6" />
<xsl:variable name="seed" />
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="function-available('exsl:node-set')">
<xsl:value-of select="document(concat('/cgi-bin/rand.pl?', $scale, '&amp;x=', generate-id(exsl:node-set($seed))))" />
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="function-available('msxsl:node-set')">
<xsl:value-of select="document(concat('/cgi-bin/rand.pl?', $scale, '&amp;x=', generate-id(msxsl:node-set($seed))))" />
</xsl:when>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>


That'll give you six random values, assuming the Perl script recognizes the &x=Idxxxxx as cache-append garbage.

Interesting approach however when I test it with browsers then Firefox (3.0), Opera (9.63) and Safari (3.2) all seem to generate the same id each time that template is called:
http://home.arcor.de/martin.honnen/xslt/test2009072402.xml
(stylesheet: http://home.arcor.de/martin.honnen/xslt/test2009072402Xsl.xml)

Only IE (tested with IE 8) generates different ids.

In XSLT 1.0 (I was surprised to rediscover just now), the value of variable
$seed is not a result tree fragment, it is a zero-length string. So I'm a
little bit surprised that exslt:node-set() should work on it at all, and not
particularly surprised that it should generate the same node-set each time.

	Martin Honnen
	http://msmvps.com/blogs/martin_honnen/