RE: MSXML Whitespace handling

[Kay Michael <Michael dot Kay at icl dot com>]

> 
> Andrew Kimball wrote:
> > > the XSLT spec makes it sound like I
> > > can expect whitespace characters in my physical document...
> > 
> > Where does the spec say "physical document"?  The spec uses 
> the term "input tree"
> 
> I covered this in another post. I am not saying XSLT is not about
> tree-to-tree transformation. 
> 
> It and the XPath spec do mention in several places that it's 
> not just any tree they're talking about, it's a tree derived from an XML 
> document. 

Just to muddy the waters further, the conformance rules say that an XSLT
processor must be able to use a stylesheet to transform a source tree to a
result tree. 

The word stylesheet is never defined (and it's sometimes used to mean a
single XML document - what I call a "stylesheet module" in my book - and
sometimes a collection of XML documents linked through xsl:include and
xsl:import) but the closest is in 2.2: "A stylesheet is represented by an
xsl:stylesheet element in an XML document". So the source and result are
trees, but the stylesheet is one or more XML documents. This is why I drew
the diagram on page 49 of my book the way I did.

Since this discussion is about whitespace in the _stylesheet_, not the
source document, I think this distinction is relevant.

Mike Kay


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