[Bug 4546] [XSLT] testing for namespace axis support

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=4546





------- Comment #1 from mike@saxonica.com  2007-05-09 08:20 -------
Personal response: I have some sympathy with both parts of this requirement. It
does seem a little odd that XSLT 2.0 simultaneously introduced the ability to
create namespace nodes and deprecated the mechanism for retrieving them. And it
is indeed unfortunate that we don't provide an interrogative that enables the
application to determine whether the axis is supported or not.

My feeling is that we could solve the second issue by means of a permissive
erratum: "An implementation MAY provide the following system property:
xsl:supports-namespace-axis, returns the string "yes" in the case of a
processor that supports use of the namespace axis, or "no" otherwise. Note that
if this system property is not provided,
system-property('xsl:supports-namespace-axis') will return a
zero-length-string."

This erratum would not affect the conformance of existing implementations, so I
think it might be acceptable. On the other hand, it is feature creep.

Received on Wednesday, 9 May 2007 08:20:11 UTC