RE: XSLT/XPath 2.0: a USEFUL way to provide lexical in

> I think, as a user, I'd rather see a "lexical" XPath axis
> (pair?), to let me
> hop back & forth between the tree w/ the lexical constructs
> and without.  I
> think this would be much easier to use, and its use could be better
> encapsulated within a small number of templates.

It's a nice idea in principle, but I have some difficulty seeing how to
flesh out the detail. The two main lexical components, entity references and
CDATA sections, occur in the middle of character data, so it's not obvious
how you would represent them on a separate axis. You could represent them by
new node types (e.g. a start-cdata node and an end-cdata node) on the child
axis, which would not be selected by the node() nodetest but only by some
new lex() nodetest. However, the overall effect would be much more pervasive
to the XSLT specification, the data model, and implementations. I agree that
it's in some ways cleaner than the "bolt-on" proposed by Appendix F, but
because it's so pervasive, I think it would have a smaller chance of
acceptance.

Mike Kay


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