RE: [xsl] Automatically copying an element's attributes and their values

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:12 PM 9/8/2003, Mike wrote:
> I'm interested in people's views on "recoverable errors". In the case of
> errors like this that are clearly under the control of the stylesheet
> author, should we be making them non-recoverable (fatal) errors? Most of
> the new run-time error conditions in XSLT 2.0 are non-recoverable, but
> the old 1.0 ones haven't changed much. I think the original reasoning
> was that with client-side transformations in particular, it's better to
> put anything on the screen rather than a syntax error message. Does
> anyone think that's a valid argument?

I do, but I also think that identifies exactly the gap between a 
transformation language designed only for final transformations into a 
display format (or onto the screen), which are typically down-conversions 
(no interpolation of structure, no complex type-based operations, only 
trivial grouping and sorting), and a transformation language designed for 
truly arbitrary transformations, including up-conversions and the rest.

As for the question itself, if XSLT 2.0 is truly the latter kind of 
language, I could live with either option, though if it is a 
non-recoverable error I'd at least want decent reporting of the problem. 
Having reasonably useful error messages, however, is something I'm afraid 
the spec can't mandate, can it? Yet this example (something breaks because 
xml:space is set to 'preserve') illustrates how obscure problems can be.

Would it be possible for XSLT to work in either mode? Perhaps that's what's 
implied by the hybrid approach (non-recoverable for new XSLT 2.0 run-time 
errors, recover  1.0 errors) -- or maybe the hybrid approach is just a 
muddle, and we really need a switch for "debug" mode or whatever, not a 
distinction based on having a display transformation technology wrapped 
inside an arbitrary transformation technology, with blurry boundaries 
between them?

Regards,
Wendell



> Michael Kay
>
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


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