RE: [xsl] Namespace wildcards

At 2:19 PM +0000 2/2/02, Michael Kay wrote:

>I agree it's open to misuse, but there are cases where it is genuinely
>useful. I've heard of a number of cases (though I can't cite them) where
>people have used different namespaces to represent versions or variants of
>an XML vocabulary, but where the variants are sufficiently close to make it
>possible to write stylesheets that can handle all of them.
>

Didn't one of the earlier drafts of XHTML do this? Yes, checking I 
see that it was 
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/PR-xhtml1-19990824/#normative

However, I recall that this caused a huge hue and cry and was fixed 
before it went to Rec. I don't think this is very common in practice. 
And as someone else pointed out, if you really needed this you could 
always do

<xsl:template match="*[local-name(.)="whatever"]">
   ...
</xsl:template>

Let's just not make this too easy. I don't want anyone tripping over 
this by accident.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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Received on Monday, 4 February 2002 00:30:38 UTC