Re: Well-formed

[Mike Brown <mike at skew dot org>]

> Does output have to be well-formed as it appears in the xsl stylesheet,
> or just the way that it will appear in the resulting output document.

As others have mentioned, well-formed, as XSL is XML.

I would add, for better understanding:

The stylesheet is not a specification for literal output. It is a set of
instructions which are first interpreted as an abstract tree of nodes,
themselves, before the XSLT processor begins to interpret and execute
them.

The language affords some convenience in that it lets you place "literal
result elements" -- elements that are not in the namespace reserved for
XSLT instructions -- this stylesheet tree, thus obviating the need to use
xsl:element and xsl:attribute instructions every time you want to create
elements and attributes in the result tree. This is what you're doing with
the <fo:foo/> elements in your stylesheet; they get copied to the result
tree as-is, along with the invisible namespace nodes they may have
inherited from further up in the stylesheet tree.

After the result tree has been created, some kind of (linear) output *may*
be derived from it. The xsl:output instruction and certain other
attributes on other instructions give the processor hints as to what
kind of output you would like, if it indeed supports output. I think they
all do, but the spec says they don't have to.


P.S. If you're American, Happy Independence Day, or,
as I think it is known in the UK, Good Riddance Day.

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


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