I'm still leaning toward the argument that the result tree is strictly an
architectural construct, and that the DOM or SAX output *is* a
serialization -- we are simply serializing to those pre-parsed
representations rather than to a character stream.
I believe that's a severe abuse of the word "serialization". DOM or
SAX output is *not* serialization. By this definition any conversion
from one object model to another, XML or not, would be serialization.
In normal English usage, serialize implies a sequence which object
structures don't necessarily have. In common programming usage
serialization means a conversion to a byte sequence or stream. For
instance see the Wikipedia article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization which states:
In computer science, serialization means to force one-at-a-time
access for the purposes of concurrency control, or to encode a data
structure as a sequence of bytes.
This latter form of serialization involves is taking a data structure
or object and encoding it into a regular and usually
architecture-independent form, suitable for archival to a file,
piping to another application, or, by extension, transmission across
a network. Usually the encoding takes the form of a byte stream (a
sequence of bytes). When receiving a serialized stream, the encoding
process is reversed to get a copy of the original data structure.
And in XSLT specifically, I think section 16 is clear that xsl:output
means serialization to a "sequence of bytes".
(Do you _REALLY_ not want HTML-mode output to generate an HTML-correct
in-memory rendering?)
Yes, that's what I want. If my stylesheet generates incorrect HTML,
that's what I expect to see unless I ask for something else. This is
especially important for HTML because even without xsl:output, the
processor may flip into HTML output mode if it sees the root element
is html.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo(_at_)metalab(_dot_)unc(_dot_)edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA