Re: [xsl] is xslt "canonicalizable" can it be canonicalized?

["Michael Kay michaelkay90@xxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> My motivation here is to be able to pre-process templates while not having
to canonicalize the xslt myself in order to make sure.. for example, that I'm
not going to have to handle those two (or many more) methods of doing the same
thing with separate template matches in the pre-processor templates.
>

It looks like your challenge is a bit similar to the problem I tackled in
using XSLT to transpiling Saxon source code from Java to C#. Doing this for a
specific source program, even one of half a million lines, is an order of
magnitude easier than doing it for the general case -- for example, Saxon
probably only uses 1% of the methods in the standard JDK library, and the rest
can be ignored. Similarly, processing your own XSLT code is going to be vastly
easier than processing arbitrary XSLT code.

Michael Kay
Saxonica