Co-validating stylesheets?

> But there's no way to make use of the XHTML DTD's declarations of
> containment relationships between XHTML elements. You could not compare this
> stylesheet against a combination of XSLT and XHTML DTDs in order to
> determine that this stylesheet produces invalid XHTML and is therefore an
> "invalid" stylesheet. If DTDs could deal with namespaces and express
> descendant containment rules rather than just parent-child relationships,
> you could probably do it.

This is something I had give some thought to, and am actually quite
curious what other people had to say about it. Obviously one DTD isn't
powerful enough for this sort of thing, because of the explanation above.
But the general question of "given DTD A, DTD B, and a stylesheet which
claims to tranform instances of A into B, can the transformation be
'co-validated' against the source and result DTDs" is an interesting
question...

You would likely have to throw out the possibility of text nodes, but most
other XSLT functions I can think of are deterministic and predictable in
how they generate result tree fragments.

What do people think about this?

Dan Rosen


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