Re: [xsl] ***********Transformation of an XML document containing a default namespace ************

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman at CraneSoftwrights dot com>]

At 01/10/24 17:40 +0100, David Carlisle wrote:
> > I tried doing something like this a few weeks ago and it didn't work
> > for me.  There seems to be no way to control which namespace prefix
> > (including the "empty" prefix) the serializer uses if there is more
> > than one prefix for a given namespace URI.
>
>there are two answers to this: "yes" and "no".
>
>According to the spec, you _never_ get any control over th eprefixes
>used, and it is perfectly OK for an XSLT serialiser to always use
>prefixes like kmsqzzxss1: kmsqzzxss2: .... even if the stylesheet uses
>fo: or whatever.  (So this is the no, it can't be done answer)
>
>However most (all?) systems do in fact try to preserve the namespace
>prefixes in most situtaions.

Can we not, however, assume that the processor has to preserve the 
namespace prefix regardless of what the Spec says?

The reason I ask came up when I wrote a stylesheet that writes stylesheets, 
and I used a processor that did not preserve the namespace prefix ... the 
author of the processor ended up changing it so it does preserve the prefix 
because this particular situation I had (and anyone else could have) 
requires that it be done.

Consider I have a stylesheet using "xsl:" for XSLT instructions and "xslo:" 
for my result tree prefix where the XSLT stylesheet generates an XSLT 
stylesheet using namespace-alias accordingly.  Given I am using "xslo:" in 
the template for my result, I may have the following:

   <xsl:template match="foo">
     <xslo:value-of select="system-property('xslo:version')"/>
   </xsl:template>

If the processor does not preserve the prefix that I use, then the 
resulting XSLT stylesheet will not have a valid string being passed to the 
system-property() function, as there would be no namespace mapped to the 
prefix I use in my function argument.  And no amount of heuristics would 
help a processor unambiguously find my use of namespace prefixes in other 
contexts than a namespace prefix of elements or attributes.

I hope this helps.

........................ Ken


--
G. Ken Holman                      mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
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