RE: XSLT 1.1 draft: no enhancement of format-number

>p.s. Coverage of format-number in Michael Kay's XSLT Programmer's Reference
seems >to imply that scientific notation is already supported in XSLT 1.0
(pg 82 first 
>pp, pg 458 second pp), however scientific notation is not mentioned in the
JDK 
>1.1 DecimalFormat

This is a known error in the book.

Generally I concur with the remarks that format-number() is underspecified.
The essence of the problem is that it is underspecified in the JDK 1.1
documentation. But there are other issues, for example XSLT doesn't say how
errors should be handled, and it doesn't say whether an implementation that
mirrored JDK 1.3 would be conformant or not. Currently Saxon exhibits
different behaviour depending on which JVM is in use, which is hardly a
satisfactory state of affairs.

Mike Kay

Received on Wednesday, 10 January 2001 06:00:29 UTC