Re: Dumb question from a newbie on XSLT in IE5 (Namespaces etc)

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> The damn thing has an http:// in front of it tho'! Is that really needed
> if the address is designed never to be actually accessed?

the claim is that using uri's guarantees global uniqueness, that is it
is clear that I shouldn't define a namespace http://www.es.co.nz.
While technically this is true. It has probably generated more confusion
than any other xml feature.

> Would it have been correct for Microsoft, when it published its own
> implimentation, to have instead specified
> xmlns:xsl="http://www.microsoft.com/1999/XSL/Transform"; and saved a lot
> of headaches?

well even as is, they have a different namespace but that doesn't really
help, people get confused anyway. Partly the problem is that the
documentation for the microsoft variant (which was rather good I thought
when I tried to use it) was rather quiet about which features were in
the w3c draft (at that time, end of 98) and which were microsoft
extensions. so the problem isn't so much technical as one of perception,
what people `expect' to find in xsl.

> And on that, aren't some posters being more than a little out-of line
> deriding
> 'the-language-known-as-xsl-in-ie5-which-is-a-completely-different-language'
> when stylesheets of that ilk do indeed label themselves as conforming to
> a different spec and are therefore not pretending to be what they are
> not?</long sentence>

`some posters' being me, mainly:-) as noted above, the namespace ie5 used
wasn't a microsoft special namespace it was (at the time) the namespace
used in the w3c draft, but since then xslt changed drastically but of
course microsoft had by then shipped a few dozen copies of IE5.
So  it isn't really that in this case microsoft were so bad, just
overtaken by events. By being `out of line' I am being a bit unfair
to microsoft, but a) I suspect that they are big enough to take
a bit of leg pulling, and b) it helps to stress to people that it isn't
just a simple matter of `changing namespaces'. If they are used to
the IE5 system then they need to either keep to that or to quite
radically re-write their stylesheets. Microsoft do supply some tools to
help with the conversion, but still unlikely to be fuly automatic on all
but the simplest stylesheets.


> And while that might not get supported by anyone, it would at least play
> nicely with all the other files out there. The parser decides it doesn't
> recognise the named implimentation, and then chooses what to do about
> that. It could actually request that URL and find out more... say

The top level element may declare any number of namespaces, there is no
way for a system to know in general which namespace is supposed to be
the xsl-variant that should run the stylesheet. If the XSL namespace
isn't declared then it should raise an error. (a higher level filter
could look at the sheet and decide which processor to pass it to based
on some extra information about the range of processors supported,
but once the file is passed to an XSL processor, it had better be XSL.

David







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