Re: [xsl] xsl:sort descending causes attribute nodes to be created after children, causing an error

[Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

David Carlisle wrote:
> yes that's the expected behaviour (although of course it's nothing
> really to do with the xsl:sort, a more direct case is
>
> <x>
> hello
> <xsl:attribute name="x"/>
>   

I knew that it wasn't allowed explicitly. However, in the example I 
gave, the child nodes of the rows-node are ordered based on their text() 
child. I realize now that this never selects anything on the attribute 
axis (having no children) and thus returns an empty sequence, which ends 
up at the start of the ascending sort (which causes no problems). 
Reversing the sort places it at the end, causing the error.

sounds all in all quite logical eventually.

> It's required to allow an implemenation to start serialising the result
> tree before processing is finished. If you were allowed to generate an
> entire document then generate a version="2" attribute as the last node
> before closing teh document element, the processor would always haveto
> buffer the entire result tree in memory just in case the system did
> this.
>   

Thanks for this explanation. I often wonder the "why" behind a given 
feature of the spec, this makes it sound so more plausible.

Cheers,
-- Abel Braaksma