Re: Clarification on xsl:attribute requested

From: "Kay, Michael" <[email protected]>

> Firsly, I assume I should read "Xalan" for "Xerces" throughout.

Good catch. Actually our report was "JAXP 1.2 from the summer '02 XML 
Pack download from Sun. It's based on Xalan-j 2.3.1_01 "  Far too many X things.

> In XSLT 2.0 we've added xsl:namespace as a proper solution of the problem.

Excellent.
 
> I'm not sure if the above is pertinent to your problem with Xalan: are you
> looking at the serialized output, or at the result tree?

Serialized output.

> XSLT 2.0 introduces the notion of namespace fixup, which makes it clear that
> a namespace node is indeed added to the result tree. I think that
> introducing this concept to XSLT 1.0 is too big a change to do by means of
> an erratum.

But MSXML, XT, Xalan4C 1.0, Xalan4J 2.0, Oracle, SAXON, infoteria, and
several others support work this way already (otherwise they would fail) So I don't believe it is a big change: it is common practise. 

> XSLT 1.0, and 2.0, are both quite explicit that when you create elements and
> attributes on the result tree, there is no guarantee what prefix you will
> get. We recently considered whether we should add a recommendation on the
> prefix to be used in the case of xsl:namespace-alias, and the group was
> firmly against it. So I think it's unlikely the group would want to accept
> this proposed change.
 
Just to clarify: 

1) So you are saying that there are XSLT 1.0 transformation possible
that result in an invalid infoset?  So if I do
  <xsl:attribute name="xxx:zzz" namespace="blahblah" />
that an implementaiton may serialize the result without a namespace
declaration?   (That is the thing I think is a bug, that should be clarified.)

2) You think the WG would be against even even a recommendation of
best practise that implementations should attempt to use existing
prefixes rather than generating their own, where possible.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe