Re: Microsoft XSL and Conformance

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Agreed, but what I think is important is that developers know and understand
> what of those extenstions are not "standard" and therefore porting your XSL
> may incur problems.

But that is never a problem in a conforming XSLT system. extensions are
always in a different namespace and it is always possible to write a
stylesheet that checks whether an extension is available and offers
fallbacks if it is not.

Placing extension elements in the xsl namespace (or changing the meaning
of standard elements in the xsl namespace such as template) is an abuse
of the whole XML/namespace mechanism: end users are entitled to believe
that elements in a W3C namespace act as specified by the W3C.

The particular example that started this thread appears to be just a
`feature' of an early release, and not any evil MS plot, but the
principle is unchanged, and it is worrying that some of the later
discussion seemed to imply that some such extensions might be a good
idea.

David


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