Thank you David for your comments..
I'll summarize my understanding of Microsoft's XSLT
processor(particularly whitespace behaviour) ..
1) IE 6's XSLT processor
We cannot control whitespaces from XSLT (with
xsl:preserve-space and xsl:strip-space). This is due
to, XML parser stripping the whitespaces by default,
and supplying a tree to XSLT engine which never
contain whitespaces..
Wish of XSLT developers..
We want XSLT stylesheet *to be able to* control
whitespaces.. However, in scripting environment we can
do it with preserveWhiteSpace property.
This is *technically not a non-conformance*, as said
by Mr. Kay earlier. Because XSLT spec says, XSLT
engine operates on input trees(i.e what a XML parser
gives it). How white spaces are handled *during XML
parsing* is outside the scope of XSLT spec.
2) MSXML4 (which is a seperate product, and presently
not usable in IE by default. It can however be used
via scripting)
XSLT developers are now *able to* control whitespaces
from stylesheets. xsl:preserve-space and
xsl:strip-space *have effect*.. The characteristic
present in IE 6(as described above) is reversed. Now
XML parser preserves whitespaces by default, before
supplying to XSLT engine..
This test case (now a sort of conformance suite for
whitespaces!):
XML file -
<pre>
<b>bold</b>
<i>italic</i>
</pre>
XSLT file -
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="text"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:value-of select="count(/pre/child::node())"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Produces output 5 (with MSXML4)
If MSXML4 is able to run in IE by default, we'll get
desired behaviour.. This we can wish, will happen in
future versions of IE.
David, if you agree with my understanding, we may
close this thread.
Regards,
Mukul
--- David Carlisle <davidc(_at_)nag(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk> wrote:
If it should be like this.. Than
xml:space="preserve"
or "default" would be non-functional! Since its
purpose is to direct XML parser to preserve or
strip
white spaces!
No. That may (or may not) be how it is implemented
but logically
parsing happens before XSLT starts, the _input_ to
XSLT is a tree
generated by the parser. xsl:strip-space is an
instruction to xslt
whether or not to ignore certain white space nodes
in the input,
not an instruction to an xml parser to not generate
those nodes.
I suggested earlier.., if we can have option in
future
versions of IE
You can ask, but it will be a very long way down a
very long list of
requested improvements. lack of support for xhtml,
css, svg, xforms, etc
etc etc affect a lot more people. And that's just
windows. IE on the mac
is another story again. If people care about these
things, they're
probably using firefox already. If they don't care
(and clearly, a lot
don't) then it's going to be hard to persuade anyone
to implement this
stuff.
If you want to put pressure on vendors to implement
a set of standards
in a conformant way then that is clearly a good
thing, but W3C isn't the
organisation to do that. It can't put pressure on
vendors; it is,
essentially, a private club of those vendors. Not
everyone working on
W3C specs works for a W3C member company (Michael
Kay is an invited
expert on XSL and Xquery Working Groups, I'm an
invited expert on the
Math Interest Group for example) but the basic
structure is that it is a
consortium of companies.
David
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