[Bug 1319] definition of a XSLT processor

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1319





------- Additional Comments From mike@saxonica.com  2005-05-13 18:27 -------
A progress report and some further thoughts:

The XSL WG discussed this on 12 May, without coming to a firm conclusion. We
leaned to the view that the definition itself doesn't need changing - you can't
try to say everything that can said about an XSLT processor in the definition.

We did think there was a need to clarify under what circumstances empty result
trees (trees consisting of a document node only) get created, especially in the
case of the implicitly-created result tree.

My own thinking on this (after the meeting) is that an explicitly-created final
result tree (using xsl:result-document) should be output and serialized even if
it is empty; but that the implicitly-created result tree that's created in the
absense of xsl:result-document should not be output (sent to the serializer,
etc) if it is empty, that is, if the document node has no child nodes. This
means that it is indeed possible for the transformation to produce zero result
trees. Such a transformation can in fact be useful: its purpose might be to
validate the source document, so that the only output is a success/failure
outcome and possibly some messages.

Michael Kay

Received on Friday, 13 May 2005 18:27:36 UTC