RE: [xsl] [XPath] matching elements which satisfy a specific content model

["Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> But I'm proposing a content-model() function whose only reason for 
> existence is simplification and terseness.
> 
> Tobi
> 

At one stage XQuery did this. It had its own grammar for describing content models, with all the paraphernalia of lists and unions and sequences, and it allowed you to test whether a particular element conformed to a particular content model (so-called "structural typing"). Everyone came down on them like a ton of bricks, saying W3C already had a language for doing that and it was called XML Schema. So they took it all out, leaving just the ability to test whether a particular element is a valid instance of a particular schema-defined type: "named typing". The result is vastly simpler, but it does assume that you want to define your content models in a schema and not in a stylesheet - a reasonable assumption, in my view.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list