Subject: [xsl] xsl:number From: Mike Brown <mike@xxxxxxxx> Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 22:49:34 -0700 (MST) |
I have questions about xsl:number. This is the most poorly specified instruction I've come across. It's really hard to even know what questions to ask. The way I interpret the XSLT 1.0 spec (and the 2.0 draft doesn't help), <xsl:number format="A"/> must be supported, and it must produce something from the sequence A, B, C, ..., Z, AA, AB, AC, ... where A=1, B=2, etc. The way it is specified, it seems to indicate that the alphabet must be the English alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. Or perhaps it could be any alphabet that starts with ABC and ends with Z, like the Spanish alphabet, which varies depending on who you ask, but for computing purposes I think is generally ABCDEFGHIJKLMNÑOPQRSTUVWXYZ. Or perhaps everything after "A" is just an example, meaning that it very well could be the Swedish alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÅÄÖ ... or perhaps Vietnamese, which starts with A and has no Z. Anyway, the implication is that a processor must support some alphabet that contains "A". Or is "A" just a placeholder for any alphabetic character? "When numbering with an alphabetic sequence, the lang attribute specifies which language's alphabet is to be used; it has the same range of values as xml:lang [XML]; if no lang value is specified, the language should be determined from the system environment." It seems to me that if format="A", then the value of lang, whether determined by the processor or specified in the stylesheet, must be a language that contains "A". What happens if the processor supports both English and Hebrew, and I do something like <xsl:number format="A" lang="he"/> ? Or for that matter, <!-- #1488 = Hebrew letter Aleph --> <xsl:number format="א" lang="en"/> ? What does <xsl:number format="B"/> mean? At the very least, I know "B" must represent 1. If the default language is English, does this mean the sequence must be B, C, D, ..., Z, BB, BC, BD, ... ? The spec also says format="I" must be supported by using Roman numerals. What does format="I" mean when the language is not English? The spec says "In many languages there are two commonly used numbering sequences that use letters. One numbering sequence assigns numeric values to letters in alphabetic sequence, and the other assigns numeric values to each letter in some other manner traditional in that language. In English, these would correspond to the numbering sequences specified by the format tokens a and i." This seems to indicate that using "I" for Roman is a "traditional" English convention, and (reading further) that I could use letter-value="alphabetic" to override this interpretation. If my theory about format="B" is correct, then format="I" with letter-value="alphabetic" would result in I, J, K, ... sequences. I don't know. I have more questions, but I'll just stop here. I really hope this stuff gets cleared up in 2.0, although that doesn't help me much in trying to properly implement 1.0. Mike -- Mike J. Brown | http://skew.org/~mike/resume/ Denver, CO, USA | http://skew.org/xml/ XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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