Re: XSLT 2.0 *and* XSLT 1.0 validation -- how to?

Hi Dimitre,

> My question was, could there be a single schema that has both the
> rules for XSLT 1.0 and the rules for XSLT 2.0 and that, dependent on
> the value of the "version" attribute of an instance behaves exactly
> as an XSLT 1.0 schema only or exactly as an XSLT 2.0 schema only.
>
> I can imagine doing this with a pre-processor, which only reads and
> analyzes the xsl:stylesheet instruction, then depending on the
> version attribute it validates with only one of two schemas. Or, if
> rules in the schema can be based on a condition, it will set the
> condition to true or false and then validate with a single combined
> schema passing to it (e.g. setting this in DOM) the value of this
> condition.
>
> Can this be done?

The trouble is that XSLT allows regions of a stylesheet to belong to
different versions. In XSLT 1.0, you can put an xsl:version attribute
on any literal result element to indicate the version of XSLT used in
the content of that element. In XSLT 2.0, any XSLT element can have a
version attribute, and any other element can have a xsl:version
attribute that does the same thing.

So it's not as simple as looking at the version attribute on the
<xsl:stylesheet> element and choosing which version of the schema to
use based on that.

I think you could probably write a RELAX NG schema that used the
version switch correctly, wherever it was used (since RELAX NG
supports co-occurrence constraints, unlike XML Schema); I haven't
looked at Norm's, so I don't know whether his does that.

Personally, I don't think that it's worth validating XSLT stylesheets
against a schema. It's simpler, quicker, more accurate and more
helpful to get an XSLT processor to check your stylesheet instead.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/