[xsl] What is the correct behaviour of vendor:node-set($x) when x is empty?

Subject: [xsl] What is the correct behaviour of vendor:node-set($x) when x is empty?
From: Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 00:38:11 -0700 (PDT)
Dear all,

Yesterday a friend of mine asked:

"just curious: are you NOT seeing a failure on the node-set($arg2) when
arg2 is empty? i hope the spec says node-set() should return null
instead of fault. but if that's the case, it looks like our XSLT
processor needs a tweek, cuz to get your code to run i need to run
node-set() only when there's data in the variable."

I cannot reply anything definite, except that Saxon 6.5, MSXML3 and
MSXML4 all work OK with node-set($x), when x is the "empty node-set"
(or should I say the "empty RTF" :o) ).

And, of course, there's nothing I could find about "what the spec says
about node-set()", as node-set() is an extension function.

I know that EXSLT is trying to promote a "standard" node-set().

Apart from this, could people, who developed XSLT processors share
their opinion what should be the correct behaviour of node-set() in
this case?

Could we have an agreed specification of it's behaviour? This will
obviously be important for anyone attempting to develop "portable" XSLT
1.0 applications while we're waiting for XSLT/XPath 2.0.

Thanks,
Dimitre Novatchev.


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