Re: [xsl] xsl:script

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

Shimon,

Actually, it's "http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl" that's earlier -- it was the 
namespace claimed by the December 1998 Working Draft of XSL (hence the 
"WD"). "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" was claimed by the final 
Recommendation version of XSLT 1.0, which was formally accepted by W3C in 
November 1999.

The older namespace, like other namespaces declared by other working 
drafts, would be long forgotten if not for an implementation that was 
released in early 1999 by Microsoft in the MSXML processor. What makes 
matters worse for those concerned with compatibility, is that this 
implementation was itself (a) not complete to the draft even at that date, 
and (b) nevertheless contained proprietary ("experimental") extensions to 
the erstwhile "XSL", which were (are?) undocumented as such. The MSXML 
parser is still out there, even being described in several books in print, 
most of which take it at face value and are unaware of the conformance 
issues and the confusion generated. To be fair, the MSXML parser was 
labelled as an experimental pre-release ... but the hype machine seems to 
downplay that, to the extent it even understands that the package is 
obsolete as delivered.

Microsoft's current release, MSXML3 -- which is not bundled with the 
browser, being obtainable only by download -- supports both the current 
Recommendation and the earlier WD.

Way too much ink has been spilled trying to straighten out this issue. This 
is why tempers seem often to be shorter than is warranted by innocent 
mistakes or understandable confusion on the part of a newbie. It's as if 
the Pinball Club were constantly being invaded by shuffleboard players 
wanting to know about the rules of shuffleboard, because a large toy 
company was selling a shuffleboard set labelled "pinball". They may be call 
it pinball, but it's really shuffleboard. (They may call it "XSL", but it's 
not.) Unlike the Pinball Club, however, there's often money and development 
time riding on this.

Regards,
Wendell


At 01:23 PM 1/18/01 -0500, you wrote:
>Hello!
>I guess this is kind of FAQ question, but I am frustrating to
>find the answer.
>I tried to add <xsl:script> element to my xsl file and
>got warning that for namespace "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
>xsl:script is not available. Then, I tried to switch to
>latest version, using namespace "http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl"
>and got warning "Keyword xsl:output may not be used in namespace"
>I need that xsl:output tag because I am transforming to xml and
>html format, depending on parameter.
>Could you tell me where can I read about current namespaces,
>differences and so on. I thought that latest namespace should include
>everything the earlier versions had plus new stuff, but seems I am
>wrong in this assumption.
>
>Shimon
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list

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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
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