RE: is XSLT 2.0 implementable? (was: N : M transforma

> I know. this and Microsoft's cavalier attitude to white space 
> are the two main causes of in-operability between stylesheets 
> (not using extensions). I would have hoped that the lesson 
> learned would be to tighten up such variability and try as 
> far as possible to nail these things down in a future spec...

That's very hard to do. There are good reasons why XSLT is defined in
terms of a transformation of one data model instance to another, leaving
a great deal of flexibility as to how (and whether) the data model
instance is derived from some source XML document. If we said that the
input had to be source XML, then we could define exactly what happened
to it, but I don't think we want to do that, and the net result is that
you (and therefore your chosen vendor) can do anything you like to the
document before the XSLT transformation starts.

As I said, this isn't a new problem. We hit the same thing with the
XInclude issue. It's just getting worse as the XML processing space gets
larger - XML Schema is just one aspect of that. 

Michael Kay


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