Re: XSLT 2.0: function-available() for stylesheet functions

Hi Karsten,

> The reason why allowing user definitions to conflict with vendor
> definitions is a bad idea is that there is no guarantee whatsoever
> that the semantics is the same. Instead of grabbing the
> date:format-date() function from EXSLT, I could just as well
> implement something slightly (or outrageously) different under this
> name (in some well-hidden include), giving readers/users of my
> stylesheet a hard time understanding/debugging it.

But that won't change under your suggestion. You could still write a
user-defined function for date:format-date() with completely different
semantics and as long as you don't use it in a processor that natively
supports date:format-date() then you'll be just fine. Similarly,
there's nothing stopping me from writing an XSLT processor that works
completely differently from how XSLT is described in the
Recommendation. Or writing a different DTD for HTML and using that for
my web pages. Nothing can stop someone from ignoring standards if they
choose to.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/

Received on Monday, 15 April 2002 17:38:10 UTC