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Re: [xsl] Is it OK for xsl:output to affect the construction of an unserialized result tree?

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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.
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Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

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