RE: [xsl] Namespace wildcards

Subject: RE: [xsl] Namespace wildcards
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2002 15:41:28 -0500
At 2:19 PM +0000 2/2/02, Michael Kay wrote:

I agree it's open to misuse, but there are cases where it is genuinely
useful. I've heard of a number of cases (though I can't cite them) where
people have used different namespaces to represent versions or variants of
an XML vocabulary, but where the variants are sufficiently close to make it
possible to write stylesheets that can handle all of them.


Didn't one of the earlier drafts of XHTML do this? Yes, checking I see that it was http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/PR-xhtml1-19990824/#normative


However, I recall that this caused a huge hue and cry and was fixed before it went to Rec. I don't think this is very common in practice. And as someone else pointed out, if you really needed this you could always do

<xsl:template match="*[local-name(.)="whatever"]">
  ...
</xsl:template>

Let's just not make this too easy. I don't want anyone tripping over this by accident.
--


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