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Re: [xsl] yet another namespace question (unwanted xmlns="")


Subject: Re: [xsl] yet another namespace question (unwanted xmlns="")
From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:23:47 +0100

On 15 August 2010 14:42, Birnbaum, David J <djbpitt@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Dear XSL List,
>
>> Move the  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" to the xsl:stylesheet
element. Currently
>> you have it inside of a template so that it only applies to the elements
created in that template.
>
> Thanks very much to Martin and Michael for the quick response and the
explanation. I now realize that I've been putting namespace declarations in
the wrong place all my life (well, all the life of the namespace spec,
anyway), thinking that because I want them to appear on the root element of my
result document  I should put them there in the stylesheet, instead of putting
them on the root element of the stylesheet itself and letting them get copied
to the root of the result. As a bonus, for the first time
exclude-result-prefixes now seems to do what I've always wanted it to do.
>

I know what you mean... intuitively you stick the namespace on the
root element of the result, and expect any elements added to the
result (from wherever that may be) to take on that namespace, as you
expect the processor to know what you are trying to do.

Instead namespaces are defined in the xml-that-is-your-stylesheet...
you have to treat your stylesheet as an xml file and check the scoping
of the namespaces defined in that xml file.

One way of demonstrating this is to generate some xhtml using 2
stylesheets, one that includes another: you have to declare the xhtml
namespace in both files - if namespaces were controlled at the XSLT
level you would only have to declare the xhtml namespace once in the
primary stylesheet, but because its at the XML level, you have to
declare it in both files.

This is only really an issue when you have an unprefixed namespace, so
if you follow the rule of "never change the default namespace" (or
"always use a prefix") you are less likely to confuse people with it.


--
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com


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