Media types and simplified stylesheets

Hi all,

Paul Prescod recently brought to my attention an issue with XSLT 1.0
that I note is still present in XSLT 2.0.  The issue involves the
simplified style module format, and the recommended use of the generic
application/xml and text/xml media types.

Consider this example;

<html xsl:version="2.0"
      xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
      xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <title>Expense Report Summary</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Total Amount: <xsl:value-of select="expense-report/total"/></p>
  </body>
</html>

Using the rules defined for the XHTML media type[1], this document is
an XHTML document because the root namespace is the XHTML namespace.
If delivered as either application/xml or text/xml, it might reasonably
be expected (see RFC 3023, Section 3, last paragraph) to process it as
XHTML, not as XSLT.

One solution would be to define an XSLT specific media type.  However,
note that using the "+xml" convention *may* also not be appropriate for
these forms of stylesheets as the convention may in the future define
this type of processing behaviour (it is certainly typical in XHTML,
SOAP, SMIL - and maybe in SVG, I haven't found the draft yet).  Granted
though, this isn't currently the case.  It may very well be that */xml
and */*+xml types will never include such a rule.

 [1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-baker-xhtml-media-reg-02.txt

MB 
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Sunday, 20 January 2002 17:59:39 UTC