[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: functions and XSLT
> XSLT templates can only create result tree fragments. An important aspect of > user defined functions is the ability to return arbitrary XPath values, including > node sets. That's the main reason why it's not sufficient to use named templates. > [snip] > > The problem is that it cannot *return* nodes comfing from, for instance, > the source tree. It can only *create* new nodes. New nodes has their > own base URI for example. In XSLT 1.0 this is the URI of the stylesheet, > in XSLT 1.1 you can change this by xsl:base but it wouldn't solve the problem > in general. I understand that people are saying there is a large distinction between providing a return value and creating a result-tree-fragment. I just don't see that two types of subroutine are required to allow these roles to be distinguished -- to me, the latter issue can and should be orthogonal to the former. The unit of subroutine should be focused upon computing the appropriate information and returning it. Exactly _how_ that information is used later -- whether that be within an XPath expression, or written out as a tree fragment -- need not (and therefore, should not!) depend upon the internal definition of the subroutine, but rather only upon the context in which the subroutine is referred to. Regarding source nodes, the inability to return a source-tree-fragment reflects the lack of a construct allowing the construction of closures, rather than an inherent, deep-seated flaw in the template mechanism. Regarding the return of boolean values, these can be handled just as numbers are, by an intermediate coercion to string. If it is felt necessary, syntactic sugar could be defined to rid us of any perceived goopiness here (though frankly, XSLT is already an angle-bracket soup to begin with! :-) Dave Gomboc XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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