Re: Dumb question from a newbie on XSLT in IE5 (Namespaces etc)

[Dan Morrison <dman at es dot co dot nz>]

David Carlisle wrote:
>
> the claim is that using uri's guarantees global uniqueness, that is it
> is clear that I shouldn't define a namespace http://www.es.co.nz.
> While technically this is true. It has probably generated more confusion
> than any other xml feature.

Granted. That was one thing I really thought Java classes had going for
them when I first read about it years ago. Unfortunately in practice
hardly any mid-low level developers can be bothered setting up messy
long names like they're supposed to. And it was the comparison with that
that made me wonder why the http is needed.

> well even as is, they have a different namespace but that doesn't really
> help, people get confused anyway.

True. But comparing two obscure URIs might be just that much simpler if
you could see that one was in fact MS branded, & that might have
something to do with 'The Troubles'.
"/TR/WD-xsl" isn't too informative to a layman. Neither is //IETF//DTD
HTML//EN for that matter... :-}

> Partly the problem is that the
> documentation for the microsoft variant (which was rather good I thought
> when I tried to use it) was rather quiet about which features were in
> the w3c draft (at that time, end of 98) and which were microsoft
> extensions. so the problem isn't so much technical as one of perception,
> what people `expect' to find in xsl.

OK. That was naughty.

> So  it isn't really that in this case microsoft were so bad, just
> overtaken by events. 

Pretty much my attitude. Annoying all the same.

> By being `out of line' I am being a bit unfair
> to microsoft, but a) I suspect that they are big enough to take
> a bit of leg pulling,

Already I'm sympathizing with you about the endless repeat of "Why
doesn't this work?" but we don't always have all the information
available.. hang on, we're on the net, we DO have ALL the information
available. *sigh* Still doesn't help sometimes!

I get the feeling that if MS had added an extra error to the parsing
engine "The namespace http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl used in this
stylesheet is not supported. This page may display imcompletely or not
at all" they would have saved themselves MUCHO bad press and many users
would not have given up in disgust & turned to Java etc. Or was that one
of those political things Jonathan? Again, I sympathize.
  

> The top level element may declare any number of namespaces, there is no
> way for a system to know in general which namespace is supposed to be
> the xsl-variant that should run the stylesheet. 

For xmlns - maybe, but this is 'xmlns:xsl' and surely more than one of
those as an attribute in an 
xsl:stylesheet would be illegal? Therefore the choice would be whether
to run it at all.

I don't think I want to go much further down this path (might give
people some annoying ideas) but does this attitude mean that there can
never be an XSL 2.0? XML has a version, but that may move faster or
slower than the changes that will be made to XSL. I would have seen the
URI as the place to indicate which TYPE of XSL processing the stylesheet
conforms to.
Or maybe the spec is totally perfect & will never need updating ;-)


Cheers, 

.dan.


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list