[xsl] Outputting a number in "scientific notation" -- is this XSLT compliant?

[Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>]

This transformation:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"   
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>

 <xsl:template match="/">
   <xsl:variable name="vNum" select="0.0000000155"/>
  
   <xsl:value-of select="$vNum"/>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when performed by a specific xslt processor produces:

1.55E-08


1. Is this a bug? This seems difficult to answer from the specs of XSLT

   1.0 and XPath 1.0

Mike Kay says in his book that:

"Unlike most other programming languages, XPath does not use scientific
notation for floating point numbers, either on input or on output. I f
you want to enter the number one trilion, you must write 1000000000000,
not 1.0E12. The only exception is that scientific notation is available
when you output a number using the format-number() function ..."

2. Another minor question here is that no xml declaration is produced
--
   is this also a bug?




=====
Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL

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