>The other day I was looking at section 2.1 of XSLT 1.0 [1]. It
>states in part that "An element from the XSLT namespace may have any
>attribute not from the XSLT namespace, provided that the expanded-name
>of the attribute has a non-null namespace URI. The presence of such
>attributes must not change the behavior of XSLT elements and functions
>defined in this document."
>Does anybody know how to reconcile that text with the behaviour of
>xsl:output attributes, such as xalan:use-url-escaping...?
I tend to agree with Dave B. that serialization changes seldom break
hard-and-fast rules ("must" provisions). When the WG did not want any
variation in the output, they said so. I think the we can summarize it
into the following policy: When the specs grant enough leeway that two
different processors can produce variant results and both conform, it
is also permissible for one processor to have external or supplemental
parameters that allow a choice between the two (conforming) variants.
"External or supplemental parameters" can occur in the form of options
on the command line, API parameters, or attributes whose namespace is
the processor-implementor's own namespace.
Is everyone comfortable with that policy?
.................David Marston
