At 2:31 PM +0100 4/30/02, Michael Kay wrote:
>XSLT processors do not build source trees, so the question doesn't arise.
>
In other words anything that happens before the source tree is
created is completely legal, no matter what. If I feed an XML file
into Saxon, and Saxon changes all my rectangle elements into circle
elements before it constructs the source tree, I have no claim that
Saxon is nonconformant. That's a pretty radical interpretation of
XSLT.
Essentially, this interpretation makes it impossible to do any
conformance testing at all of XSLT processors. For instance, the
OASIS test suite <http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xslt/> would
not be able to test any results at all because it starts with files
instead of source trees, and it's perfectly OK for the construction
process to do anything at all to those files before the transform
begins. If it chooses to scramble the order of the input elements, or
replace all attribute values with random text, or ROT-13 the PCDATA,
that's all acceptable. None of these things could be called
nonconformant.
>PS: the same arguments apply to the MSXML3 behaviour of stripping whitespace
>by default while building the tree. It's not the behaviour you might expect,
>but there's nothing in any of the specifications that stops them doing it.
I disagree. I think MSXML3 is nonconformant. In both cases a non-XSL
transform is being applied to the input document before the XSL
transform is applied. Thus the document that's transformed is not the
document that was initially supplied. I think that aside from a few
=edge cases that aren't relevant here, the XSLT algorithm is
deterministic, and we can take an XML input document, an XSLT
stylesheet, apply the latter to the former, and expect a certain
output. I think there is a function that maps XML documents onto
XPath/XSLT data models/source trees and that any process that does
not correctly implement that function is not conformant with XSLT.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | | Writer/Programmer |
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| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
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