namespace generation in the output.

Problem. I was writing a stylesheet to produce another stylesheet.
I wanted all elements output from the second stylesheet,
which were literal content to be in a specific namespace

I knew the docbook stylesheets did this to produce xhtml,
and yet Saxon kept finding out I was cheating!

<xsl:element name="xsl:stylesheet">
etc

when I tried any variant of 
<xsl:attribute name="xslns">
 ....

Saxon realised what I was doing and (correctly) told me not to.

Then I found this in the docbook stylesheets :-)


<xsl:element name="xsl:stylesheet">
  <xsl:variable name="a">
      <xsl:element name="dummy"
namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/>
  </xsl:variable>
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:copy-of select="exsl:node-set($a)//namespace::*"/>
      <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
      <xsl:apply-templates/>
   </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>


which simply copies over the namespace from the variable just declared,
which means that the stylesheet produced puts all literal content into
the xhtml namespace.


I thought it a clever way to achieve what is now
doable in xslt 2.0 (I'm sure MK or DC will tell us how :-)

This is an xslt 1.0 solution.





-- 
Regards, 

Dave Pawson
XSLT + Docbook FAQ
http://www.dpawson.co.uk