Re: [xsl] with or without namespace

[Lars Huttar <lars_huttar@xxxxxxx>]

On 11/16/2010 11:33 AM, ac wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a xslt2 stylesheet that transforms to (x)html, an XML document
> type that comes in two flavors, both with the same "local-name"
> elements, but with or without namespace.
>
> For example, either:
>
> ... xmlns:xx="aaa.cc">
> <xx:a>
> <xx:b>bla</xx:b>
> </xx:a>
> ...
>
> or
>
> ...>
> <a>
> <b>bla</b>
> </a>
> ...
>
> To process these elements irrespective of their namespace, I can use
> expressions like
> *[local-name(.) = "a"] and *[local-name(.) = "b"]
> all through the stylesheet but, in the stylesheet, I would much rather
> map everything to the same namespace (possibly to default- or
> no-namespace) and either use a single prefix, or better still, no
> prefix, all over the stylesheet, to refer to all or any of these
> elements.
> /xx:a, /xx:b, or /a , /b, for example
> What would be the best way to declare the stylesheet namespaces to
> achieve this, if possible?
>
> Thank you,
> ac
>

If you are using XSLT 2.0, you can declare a default namespace to be
used in XPath expressions; but that would not help, because you would
then be unable to address elements that are in no namespace.

I think your best bet is to declare a short prefix (like xx, as you
said) for the namespace, and then whenever you need to match "a", use
"a|xx:a". There may be some situations where that's awkward or
impossible, though...

Another alternative would be to add a preliminary transformation that
strips namespaces on all elements. Then you can feed the result of that
transformation to a stylesheet that can assume the input elements have
no namespace.
The preliminary transformation can be implemented as a separate
stylesheet, or if you have XSLT 2.0 or exslt:node-set(), it can be part
of the same stylesheet.

Lars