RE: Accessing the XML declaration, the namespace-uri() function

[Mike Brown <mbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dylan Walsh wrote:
> Is it possible to somehow access the attributes of the <?xml
> version="1.0"?> tag?

No. An XML parser looks at the XML declaration so that it can know how to go
about interpreting the character data that comprises the rest of the
document. The declaration is not fed by the XML parser into your XSL
processor.

It might help if you don't think of it as being a "tag", because unlike
other tags, it doesn't represent node(s) in the data tree that the XML
document describes. Think of it as something on the same "document layer" as
entity references like &foo;, where you don't have access to the character
sequence & f o o ; ... or perhaps think of it like a header on a uuencoded
mail message, where only the decoded body of the message is exposed to the
user.

> I'm trying to create a stylesheet that will generate a
> HTML view of any XML code

A stylesheet that generates an HTML view of XML *code* is one thing. A
stylesheet that generates an HTML view of the *node tree* that XML code
*represents* is something altogether different.

> Would it be safe to assume that the declaration is always
> <?xml version="1.0"?> and hard code it, i.e.:
> &lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt; ?

No, it's not safe to assume. If you are trying to HTMLize the code (of which
the XML declaration and entity references are a part) and not the node tree,
then you need to avoid feeding the XML source document to your XSL processor
in a manner that causes the document to be split up into the tree of nodes
that the document represents. (i.e., good luck.) I suspect that you are
actually trying to HTMLize the node tree, which doesn't contain the XML
declaration or the DTD (yet), so you need to not be worrying about it.

> Also, does the namespace-uri() function work in XT? [...]
> I can't get it to produce anything (using <xsl:value-of
> select="namespace-uri()> ).

<xsl:value-of select="namespace-uri(foo)"/> will create in the result tree a
text node containing the namespace URI of the first node in the node-set
identified by the XPath location path 'foo'.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#section-Node-Set-Functions explains several
situations which will cause this function to return an empty string. And if
you omit the argument, then the context node will be used. Are you sure your
context node has a namespace?

-Mike


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