RE: Version and output-version in XSLT 2.0

> Having introduced this new "version" attribute even makes it 
> necessary to
> introduce a new attribute, "output-version" to the 
> result-document element,
> meaning exactly the same as "version" in the output-element and even
> overridinging it!
> 
> Sorry but that is not how a new attribute should be 
> introduced! 

The XSLT 1.0 specification had (1) a version attribute on the xsl:stylesheet
element, (2) an xsl:version attribute on literal result elements, and (3) a
version attribute on the xsl:output element. The meaning of (3) was
unrelated to (1) and (2).

There were a number of other similar attributes that could appear either on
xsl:stylesheet or (with the xsl prefix) on literal result elements (for
example exclude-result-prefixes). We generalized all of these so that they
could appear on any element, mainly to allow them to be used at the level of
xsl:template or xsl:function. We weren't able to fully generalize the
version attribute in this way because of the clash with the existing
attribute on xsl:output, so we just made that an exception. Inelegant, but
not a real problem in practice, and any other solution would have been
equally messy.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/