RE: Mysterious 0utput Escaping

Thanks Michael,

Before I asked this question, I searched the Internet and didn't find any
reasonable explanations. As well as wanting a way of remembering the
mechanism for myself, I asked the question to provide a lasting reference
somewhere on the Internet. I noticed that you yourself have seen evidence
that beginners don't know what output-escaping is - which is precisely why I
asked!

Thanks again,
Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: 23 February 2008 09:21
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE:  Mysterious 0utput Escaping

In the context of XML, escaping a character means replacing the character by
an entity reference or character reference, for example replacing < by &lt;
or " by &quot;. (Why this is called "escaping" is essentially historical;
it's an analogy with the use of escape sequences in ASCII-based line
protocols, for example the use of a sequence like "ESC [ G" to set a
dot-matrix printer into italics mode).

So "output escaping" means turning special characters such as "<" appearing
in the output of a transformation into their escaped representations such as
"&lt;".

disable-output-escaping="yes" suppresses this behaviour.

You never need to say disable-output-escaping="no", because it is the
default and almost invariably the right setting. I've often wondered if the
language designers chose a long name for the attribute in the hope that
people wouldn't use it carelessly; in practice I have seen some evidence
that beginners don't know what output escaping is and therefore think it
might be a good idea to switch it off.

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