Re: [xsl] Evaluating a node-set with select (MSXSL vs. Saxon)

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

Stan,

It looks like MSXML is doing the right thing here, and Saxon is silently 
turning your Result Tree Fragment into a node set for you, which (in XSLT 
1.0) it should not.

The irony here is that MSXML used to do this, but when this was discovered 
we all howled "conformance", and they obligingly rolled it back to be 
strictly to the spec. Whereas Saxon, a very conformant processor, now 
allows it (by your account).

Just about everyone agrees it's such a powerful feature that it will be 
included in XSLT 2.0. But for *strict* XSLT 1.0 you should use a 
(proprietary) nodeset() extension (I dunno what MS calls theirs but they 
have one).

No doubt Mike K. will shed some light on this. (But I like to post to the 
list only after all the smart Brits have gone to bed ... or should have.)

Cheers,
Wendell

At 04:27 PM 4/18/2002, you wrote:
>I do indeed get this using the Saxon (6.5.1), but MSXSL (4.0) tells me that
>the $columns variable must evaluate to a node-set and fails to compile the
>stylesheet. Can anyone tell me which XSLT engine is doing the right thing
>here? I'm using the MSXSL command line utility against version 4.0 of MSXML.


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