RE: [xsl] Question regarding namespaces

["Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I have a stylesheet which I use to normalize various versions of a 
> DTD.  Some old XML documents created against this DTD do 
> not include a default namespace declaration on the root element but the 
> newer ones do, and I think the way I have to handle this is to have 
> two templates in my stylesheet, one of which selects root elements without
a 
> namespace and one which does:

Since the default namespace declaration changes the namespace of every
element in the document, not just the root element, my preferred approach to
this kind of problem is to write your stylesheet to handle the case with a
namespace, and then insert an extra stage into your processing pipeline to
add the namespace for the older documents that don't have it. This keeps
things much more simple and modular, and allows you to throw away the
non-namespace code when the problem is resolved at source.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/