Hi List,
I have a specs question that I stumbled upon when helping someone out
with his doctype problems earlier today (gmt+1). Whenever you use
doctype-system and/or doctype-system and/or standalone (other than
'omit') and you have some text node in your data model under the root,
this will raise an SEPM0004 error, as explained here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-xquery-serialization/#ERRSEPM0004.
I found only one parser actually raising that error (Saxon, of course),
one other parser (AltovaXML) either output nothing, or output the wrong
XML without error. According to the specs, you can ignore the error and
recover by removing the doctype/standalone attributes and output as normal.
Of course, the reasons behind having this error are clear in most
situations. But what should happen when the output, after character
mapping, happens to become legal XHTML/XML? Example (though not a good
use-case):
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"
use-character-maps="testmap"
standalone="yes"/>
<xsl:character-map name="testmap">
<xsl:output-character
character=""
string="

" />
</xsl:character-map>
<xsl:template match="/" name="main">
<xsl:text></xsl:text>
<some-root />
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
The result of this stylesheet, if SEPM0004 were not there, would be the
perfectly legal XML (which is the output from the - in this respect -
non-conforming AltovaXML):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<some-root />
Most of the discussion on character-maps is about "the resulting
serialized XML may be non-well-formed or non-validating". But this
situation is the other way around, by applying a character-map, the
resulting XML becomes correct. Shouldn't the SEPM0004 be raised after
this phase? Like: "if the serialized result tree does not contain
non-whitespace text nodes in the root the SEPM0004 should not be raised"?
I know, it is all a bit of a corner case. I just stumbled upon it today
and I am just curious what your (the list) thoughts are on this matter,
if any.
Cheers,
-- Abel Braaksma
http://www.nuntia.nl