Re: Which engine? (RE: JavaScript and XSL)

[Mike Brown <mike at skew dot org>]

> After I realized that SAXON ( which is very good 
> engine) makes hidden RTF->node-set typecast 
> ( the thing MS were blamed for ),  I feel not 
> comfortable when somebody says 
> 'conformant XSLT engine'  in public place.

SAXON only started doing this with version 5.5, which is only a few weeks
old. If you read the release notes you would see the reasoning behind it.
It is 'anticipatory conformance' (anticipating XSLT 1.1) whereas when
MSXML did it, it was 'irresponsible disregard for the recommended
extension function interfaces' because at that time there was no hint that
it would ever be accepted practice.

HTTP/1.0 servers started accepting and processing the HTTP/1.1 'Host:'
header long before it was even possible to be HTTP/1.1-'conformant', and
user agents were sending these headers in their HTTP/1.0 messages. When it
was finally published, HTTP/1.1 even explicitly encouraged that HTTP/1.0
implementations be updated to accept the headers. So this kind of thing is
not without precedent.

My opinion is that if I write a stylesheet with version="1.0" then it is
my job as a document author to not attempt to do anything that isn't
allowed by XSLT 1.0. If I want to do a result tree fragment to node-set
conversion, I need to use an extension function. If an XSLT processor
wants to give me the option of not using an extension function on a "1.0"  
document, then the processor may not be 1.0 conformant, as 1.0 stands
today. If XSLT 1.1 comes tomorrow and updates XSLT 1.0 the way HTTP/1.1
did to HTTP/1.0, then there is no problem. Until then, I have not written
a truly 1.0 conformant stylesheet, and I have no right to complain about
conformance of any XSLT processor. :)

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer at         My XML/XSL resources:
webb.net in Denver, Colorado, USA           http://www.skew.org/xml/


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