RE: [xsl] How to get to the XML Declaration

["Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's not always easy to know why a decision made even if you were there at
the time, and it's not always possible to divulge the reason even if you
know it ("X argued vehemently for weeks and eventually everyone else
succumbed...")

In this case, to be honest, I think it was a COULD requirement and no-one on
the WG volunteered to produce a proposal to implement the suggestion, so
nothing happened. Probably the reason no-one was enthusiastic is that it's
often pretty hard to get the information out of an XML parser anyway; also
an XML document can consist of multiple external entities, each of which has
its own encoding. It doesn't make much sense to provide the encoding unless
you also provide information about the division of the document into
external entities, and that just gets too complicated.

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



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kenneth Stephen [mailto:marvin.the.cynical.robot@xxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 10 August 2005 05:06
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [xsl] How to get to the XML Declaration
> 
> On 5/24/05, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Why would you want to do it? The encoding isn't supposed to 
> contain any
> > information apart from telling you what the encoding is, 
> which you don't
> > need to know once the document has been parsed.
> > 
> 
> Michael,
> 
>     Why was this decision made? I see from the XSLT 2.0 requirements
> document, that one of the requirements was to give XSLT the ability to
> figure out what the input encoding was. There is even a use case
> mentioned in the requirements document :
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20req (see item 1.4) which talks about why
> this would be useful.
> 
> Thanks,
> Kenneth