RE: [xsl] NodeTest expected here - problem with creating xsl:key from document(url)

Subject: RE: [xsl] NodeTest expected here - problem with creating xsl:key from document(url)
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 00:44:52 -0400
Malcolm,

At 07:09 PM 8/26/2002, you wrote:
BTW, it's not obvious to me why the key should need to be called in the context of the document on which it is based. Is my understanding of xsl:key flawed? I understand <xsl:key name="..." match="..." use="..."/> to mean: "make an in-memory index of the match nodes, keyed by the use value so I can ask for the nodes by key at some later time". Why does the key need to be called in the context of the document it is based on?

Not flawed, maybe, but incomplete. The spec is clear but doesn't explain why it's scoped this way. You'd have to ask its authors why it works the way it does; my guess is that it was apparent that some means of scoping to a particular document was called for (think of the confusion that would result if a call to the key() function returned a merged node set from all documents in play, willy-nilly), and just setting it to use the context node may have seemed the simplest. (I suppose it'd be nice to allow a third argument for a context node, the way document() itself can do, but I haven't thought it through and I wasn't on the WG.)


Cheers,
Wendell


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