RE: 2.1 Must Allow Matching on Default Namespace Witho

Steve Muench wrote:
> To someone like yourself who is an XSL veteran, it may
> never be a mistake that you make, or the workaround is
> so burnt into your brain that you don't think twice about it,
> but the WG perceived this issue as a major "learnability" hurdle.

Interesting... Now, it will be a learnability hurdle for those of use who
have already learned. But I certainly hope we'll be in the minority :)

Of course, I think they might be equally frustrated by the fact that, in
order to generate a result that's *not* in a namespace, they will have to
insert xmlns="" on their literal result elements. It's all a matter of
perspective, I suppose.

It might be worth noting that such confusion probably only arises when the
source document uses a default namespace, as in your example, which
technically is orthogonal to whether the stylesheet uses a default namespace
or not.

<sidenote>
The root of this confusion is what many have called a design flaw in XSLT,
namely the mapping of namespace prefix mappings to the in-scope namespace
declarations. I believe that DOM implementations are allowed to arbitrarily
change prefixes, because that supposedly would not change the meaning of the
document for applications.....except for XSLT stylesheets. I can't come up
with a better solution, and that's probably not going to change. I'm not
sure that I'd want it to anyway.
</sidenote>

But you still didn't answer my question. Will the default namespace be used
to evaluate XPath expressions? I know they're different specs, but I think
inconsistency there would cause even more confusion.

I like the rule in XPath that says anything in a namespace has to have a
prefix. Yeah it's different than the case with XML Namespaces, but it's a
handy thing to be able to immediately recognize whether a name test is in a
namespace or not. I could cope with this change, but it seems like it would
cause a fairly significant backward compatibility headache.

Evan Lenz
XYZFind Corp.


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list