RE: [XSLT2] 20 Serialization, default method

> Chapter 20 of the XSLT 2.0 draft defines rules for using a 
> default output method in case the method attribute isn't 
> specified. These rules essentially detect HTML or XHTML.
> 
> I wonder why there isn't a similar rule for text: if the 
> output doesn't contain a single root element but rather 
> starts with plain text then the text output method could be chosen.

I don't know why the decision was made this way, but since the XML output
method does allow the creation of external general parsed entities, in which
the first node can be a text node, I think it would be unwise to change the
default at this stage.

Regards,

Michael Kay