Thanks Michael,
Before I asked this question, I searched the Internet and didn't find any
reasonable explanations. As well as wanting a way of remembering the
mechanism for myself, I asked the question to provide a lasting reference
somewhere on the Internet. I noticed that you yourself have seen evidence
that beginners don't know what output-escaping is - which is precisely why I
asked!
Thanks again,
Richard
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike(_at_)saxonica(_dot_)com]
Sent: 23 February 2008 09:21
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Subject: RE: [xsl] Mysterious 0utput Escaping
In the context of XML, escaping a character means replacing the character by
an entity reference or character reference, for example replacing < by <
or " by ". (Why this is called "escaping" is essentially historical;
it's an analogy with the use of escape sequences in ASCII-based line
protocols, for example the use of a sequence like "ESC [ G" to set a
dot-matrix printer into italics mode).
So "output escaping" means turning special characters such as "<" appearing
in the output of a transformation into their escaped representations such as
"<".
disable-output-escaping="yes" suppresses this behaviour.
You never need to say disable-output-escaping="no", because it is the
default and almost invariably the right setting. I've often wondered if the
language designers chose a long name for the attribute in the hope that
people wouldn't use it carelessly; in practice I have seen some evidence
that beginners don't know what output escaping is and therefore think it
might be a good idea to switch it off.
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>
--~--