For this case, some form of static error reporting is already
defined in the XPath 2.0 spec. Please see:
But XSLT (even when schema aware) distances itself from the statuc
typing rules as defined in xquery/xpath (for the good reason that they
are a usability nightmare, as was found in the Xquery test suite (and
the examples in the XQuery spec) It's just ridiculously difficult to
write an expression that passes the static typing without putting
explict casts and calls to exactly-one() everywhere,
To see the slippery slope that you may not want to be on, if the schema
defines Book to take exactly one Author child (and no Foo children) then
it seems easy to argue that
schema-element(Book)/Foo should be an error but what about
schema-element(Book)/Author
static typing would force you to write
schema-element(Book)/Author[1]
and if you had
schema-element(Book)/Author[$x]
you may find yourself having to statically assert that $x is 1.
(lmost all the usability problems with the static typing feature in
xpath relate to cardinality checks as the type system
distinguishessingletons from lists (corresponding to the occurrence
indicators ? and *) but in almost all cases the automatic type inference
can not infer cardinality, so the user has to add extra assertions.
that's not to say some extra compile time warnings and/or errors could
not usefully be specified for XSLT, but I don't think they should be by
reference to the currently specified static typing feature of XPath2.
In particular I think that all types that differ only by occurrence
indicator should be unified, so if a schema says that an element may
have 2 author children, statically accept any expression selecting
author children don't try to be smart about exactly how many.
But if it says there are no Foo children, generating an error on
schema-element(Book)/Foo would probably be a win 9especially if your
typing is as accurate as mine:-)
David
http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#conformance
There is no conformance level or feature defined in this
specification that requires implementation of the static typing
features described in [XPath 2.0]. An XSLT processor may provide a
user option to invoke static typing, but to be conformant with this
specification it must allow a stylesheet to be processed with static
typing disabled. The interaction of XSLT stylesheets with the static
typing feature of XPath 2.0 has not been specified, so the results
of using static typing, if available, are implementation-defined.
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