Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: needing clarification about XSL transformation

[Markus Spath <mspath@arcor.de>]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Vitaly Ostanin wrote:
> 
> 
>>With this style xslt-processor must not copy comments and PI.
>>This style not overriding built-in templates, so saxon is
>>incorrect.
> 
> 
>   ah, so as i read this, the conflict resolution is that,
> even if i have a template that matches "node()", that will
> be overridden by the more explicit built-in rule that matches
> "comment()" explicitly, whose effect is to do nothing with
> the comment.
> 
>   perhaps it's just kay's wording, but in his book at the
> bottom of p. 315, he writes (after a list of how template
> matching is done):
> 
>   "If there are *no* [my emphasis] templates that match
> the selected node, the built-in template for the relevant
> node type is used."
> 
>   the way i read this is that the "node()" test *would*
> match a comment(), and thus my template would be used.
> apparently, that's not what he meant, but you can see
> how it could be interpreted that way, i hope.

but that actually would imply that kay contrdicts himself.

XPath rec says: A node test node() is true for any node of any type *whatsoever*

anyway: if you are really interested in resolving this issue, i'd suggest you 
post it at the xsl mailing list, both kay and veillard (author of xsltproc, if 
i remember right) will probably be eager to proove their transformer is conformant.

or you take a pragmatic approach and just include comment() and pi(), since the 
  w3c recommendations are ambiguous sometimes.

markus