Re: xml-stylesheet base resource identifier

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Daniel Veillard writes:

> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 02:00:11PM +0100, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
>> So I agree that the situation with this document:
>> 
>> <?xml-stylesheet type='text/css' href='my.css'?>
>> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
>>  <head>
>>   <base href="http://www.w3.org/Style/"/>
>>  . . .
>> </html>
>> 
>> is unclear, and that the *XML Stylesheet* REC should be amended to
>> cover it.
>
>   Not in my opinion. The xml-stylesheet PI was defined to be language
> agnostic. An XSLT processor should not start to add language specific
> knowledge to process the PI and load the stylesheet.
>   This is opening the door to one revision per XML language designed,
> that sounds really wrong, and a sure garantee to ruin interoperability
> of implementations.

In general, I agree, we want to avoid that kind of cross-product
multiplication.

In this case, however, this is the language which *XML Stylesheet*
already refers to for its semantics, and how that reference is meant
to operate is just not clear in this case, at least not to me.  I can
make credible (to me) arguments both that the stylesheet should be
fetched from http://www.w3.org/Style/my.css _and_ that it should be
fetched from http://www.example.org/demo/dummy/my.css, supposing that
the document itself were being retrieved from
http://www.example.org/demo/dummy/toughOne.html

The first is correct, because *XML Stylesheet* says a) Use HTML
semantics and b) you can turn (xhtml) LINK elements into
'xml-stylesheet' PIs -- inverting that gives me

 <link type='test/css' rel='stylesheet' href='my.css'/>

where the <base.../> will have the HTML-specified impact.  (Ignoring
the inversion, we get a _third_ possible interpretation -- throw an
error, use of relative URI _before_ <base. . ./>)

The second is correct because *XML Stylesheet* is clearly meant to be
language-independent, its interpretation constant across all XML
documents, so the base URI of the document entity should be used.

That's a sufficiently plausible contradiction that I think we should
fix it.

ht
- -- 
 Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
                     Half-time member of W3C Team
    2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
            Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                   URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
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Received on Monday, 2 October 2006 15:37:56 UTC