RE: XSL 2.0 xsl:result-document and xsl:output

> In the following draft version of XSL 2.0 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#element-output
> 
> there is this instruction:
> 
> <!-- Category: instruction -->
> <xsl:result-document
...
> and
> 
> <!-- Category: declaration -->
> <xsl:output
...
> 
> In my opinion there should be something that instructs the 
> processor to overwrite or concatenate the result to external 
> file.

If appending to a file were allowed, the results of the stylesheet would
depend on the order of execution of instructions. XSLT is designed to
avoid such dependencies.

There is however an instruction xsl:message. It is documented that the
order in which messages are output is implementation-defined.
Implementors can provide control over the destination of xsl:message,
allowing it to be used for the kind of logging applications you
describe. This can be done with XSLT 1.0 - it doesn't even need any XSLT
2.0 enhancements (though in the Saxon implementation, appending the
results of xsl:message to a file does require you to write some Java
code).

Michael Kay


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