Maybe the question should be reduced to:
"What information is arguably lost in the identity transform?"
...
Within the restricted world-view of XSLT, of course (which we
frequently
adopt happily) the answer is "nothing", insofar as
"information" is defined
as "that which has been expressed in an XML information set
(as implemented
by a conformant XSLT processor). An XSLT processor knows nothing of
anything else.
It's actually not quite "nothing".
- unparsed entities make it into the XSLT input but not into its output
- base URI is lost
- the isID and isIDREF properties of elements and attributes are lost (I
think - need to check)
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
--~------------------------------------------------------------------
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
To unsubscribe, go to: http://lists.mulberrytech.com/xsl-list/
or e-mail: <mailto:xsl-list-unsubscribe(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
--~--