Re: [xsl] Generating XSLT

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2004-11-15 16:46 +0100, Geert Josten wrote:
> > > <xsl:namespace-alias stylesheet-prefix="out" result-prefix="xsl"/>
> >
> > See, now that is just *clever*, that makes it a lot easier. :-)
>
> It sure is, but still quite silly that only the namespace is renamed and 
> not the prefixes as well. In other words, just renaming the prefixes 
> _instead_ of the namespaces would have been nicer...

It has been tried and failed.

If you don't preserve the prefix then when you use the target prefix in an 
attribute value (and the processor doesn't know which attribute values are 
qnames that require namespace prefix transliteration), then you end up with 
a disconnect.  Your emitted stylesheet includes namespace prefix uses 
without a resolved namespace URI.

"In the early days" (tomorrow is the 5th anniversary of XSLT/XPath 1.0!) 
there were processors that emitted arbitrary namespace prefixes in the 
result tree and my stylesheets for writing stylesheets didn't work.

Yes, I know the spec doesn't oblige the processor to use the authored 
prefix, but I cannot see any other way.  Even if you hardwire the processor 
to recognize output XSLT and transliterate only the namespace prefixes 
found in there in context (awkward at best), that disenfranchises other 
existing and future vocabularies that will need to have the output 
namespace bound for attribute value usage.

If the processor uses an arbitrary namespace prefix, it will never know 
which values in the result tree are QNames.

But if the processor uses the authored namespace prefix, then the author of 
the stylesheet has an assurance that the use of QNames arbitrarily in the 
result will have bound prefixes.

I hope this helps.

............................ Ken


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