RE: Declaring internal entities in an xsl-file

["John E. Simpson" <simpson at polaris dot net>]

At 09:41 PM 02/04/2000 +0100, Mattias Beermann wrote:
>I would also like to use CSS, but this thing must work with old browsers as
>well. You example works but produces the same error as before when I set the
>parser to ValidateOnParse = True, I'm using the MSXML2.DOMDocument parser.
>The error I get is:
>
>Line: 6 - The element 'xsl:stylesheet' is used but not declared in the
>DTD/Schema. error '80004005'
>
>Should I just ignore this error and use ValidateOnParse = False, or should I
>try to find a dtd for xhtml and for xsl? What is the recommended way of
>doing it? Is it bad practice to create documents that aren't valid?

The MS parser does all kinds of what I think are strange things.

But yes, in this case I'd go ahead and shut off validation. Per the thread 
on XSL-List earlier this week (I know, the archive is down), validation and 
XSLT processing do not generally play well together, even with other 
(non-MS) parsers. That's because the XSLT elements and variables are in a 
different vocabulary than the result tree's (XHTML's, in your case), and it 
can be quite tricky to "merge" them into one vocab, with one DTD.

I don't think it's necessarily "bad practice" to create documents that 
haven't been validated, especially in the case of XSLT where it can 
actually be bad practice (as you're finding) to *force* validation. If your 
source document is valid, that's the important thing -- let the well-formed 
XSLT be checked for XSLT syntax errors by whatever XSLT processor you're 
using, of course, but otherwise don't think about validation in a core-XML 
sense. (Just my opinion, others undoubtedly feel differently.)

====================================================================
John E. Simpson            |  My girlfriend asked me, "Did you sleep
simpson@polaris.net        |  good?" I said, "No, I made a few
http://www.flixml.org      |  mistakes." (Stephen Wright)


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