RE: www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#element-copy-of

If you are producing text output, I would imagine that you could always use
xsl:value-of, since you presumably don't want elements and attributes in the
output. The xsl:value-of instructions retains its separator attribute.

We removed the separator attribute from xsl:copy-of because with the new
sequence construction semantics in XSLT, it became very complex to specify
how many nodes were generated in the presence of the separator attribute.
For example,

  <xsl:value-of select="1,2,3,4" separator="|"/>

produces a single text node, so people might also expect

  <xsl:copy-of select="1,2,3,4" separator="|"/>

to produce a single text node. But then what would:

  <xsl:copy-of select="//thing" separator=","/>

produce?

We also felt that users would be frustrated that they couldn't do things
like:

  <xsl:copy-of-select="//para" separator="<hr/>"/>

The use cases for introducing a text separator when copying nodes, as
distinct from atomic values, seemed slim, so we took the facility out,
purely to keep the spec simpler.

Michael Kay


> -----Original Message-----
> From: David.Pawson@rnib.org.uk [mailto:David.Pawson@rnib.org.uk] 
> Sent: 12 May 2003 11:45
> To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
> Subject: www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#element-copy-of
> 
> 
> 
> This draft contains:
> 
> <xsl:copy-of
>   select = expression
>   copy-namespaces = "yes" | "no"
>   validation = "strict" | "lax" | "preserve" | "strip"
>   type = qname />
> 
> 
> In the previous draft the separator attribute was present.
> 
> In generating a pipe separated list in XSLT with text method 
> output, I found that attribute very useful.
> 
> What alternative replaces it please?
> If none,
>   what was the justification for its removal?
> 
> Regards DaveP.
> AC RNIB
> 
> **** snip here *****
> 
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Received on Monday, 12 May 2003 22:40:43 UTC