Re: Canonical XML and xmlns:xml

Joseph Kesselman wrote:

> Clarification: The quote re
>   "I'm not sure whether this should be marked as LATER,
>    or as WONTFIX since we expect that XSLT2 will actually
>    make what we're doing legitimate."
> refers specifically to the fact that Xalan does not replicate the Namespace
> Node onto every child node -- it does support the namespaces axis, but does
> so by returning the Namespace Node at the point where the namespace was
> declared. This difference is essentially invisible unless you absolutely
> insist on counting the Namespace Nodes present in a subtree or asking for
> their parents -- both of which are  _EXTREMELY_ rare operations in
> real-world stylesheets and XPaths.


True enough.

I have found this, in a real world application, writing a pretty printer 
in XSLT and noticing that the resulting document was quite different 
depending on the XSLT processor I was using but I reckon that this is a 
very specific operation.


> Xalan does put a heavy emphasis on standards compliance. But my best
> information at this time suggests that the XSLT committee has recognized
> that this concept of replicating the Namespace Nodes onto all the
> descendents was a Bad Idea in the first place, and that they are planning
> to remove the ability to ask the questions which expose this difference. If
> they do so, Xalan will probably be fully compliant as it stands.


OTH, XSLT 1.0 will probably be used still for a while and it seems like 
a good idea to be compliant with it as it stands today, or I have missed 
something else?

Eric


> I'm not sure why this affects anyone writing a canonicalizer. Ideally, you
> shouldn't care where the namespace was actually declared. Since that
> doesn't affect the semantics of the document, I would expect
> canonicalization to suppress that information...?
> 
> ______________________________________
> Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research
> 
> 
> 



-- 
See you in Orlando for XML 2001.
                                     http://www.xmlconference.net/xmlusa/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
http://xsltunit.org      http://4xt.org           http://examplotron.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Received on Monday, 26 November 2001 14:11:43 UTC