RE: [xsl] NodeTest expected here - problem with creating xsl:key from document(url)

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

Malcolm,

At 07:09 PM 8/26/2002, you wrote:
> BTW, it's not obvious to me why the key should need to be called in the 
> context of the document on which it is based. Is my understanding of 
> xsl:key flawed? I understand <xsl:key name="..." match="..." use="..."/> 
> to mean: "make an in-memory index of the match nodes, keyed by the use 
> value so I can ask for the nodes by key at some later time". Why does the 
> key need to be called in the context of the document it is based on?
Not flawed, maybe, but incomplete. The spec is clear but doesn't explain 
why it's scoped this way. You'd have to ask its authors why it works the 
way it does; my guess is that it was apparent that some means of scoping to 
a particular document was called for (think of the confusion that would 
result if a call to the key() function returned a merged node set from all 
documents in play, willy-nilly), and just setting it to use the context 
node may have seemed the simplest. (I suppose it'd be nice to allow a third 
argument for a context node, the way document() itself can do, but I 
haven't thought it through and I wasn't on the WG.)

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
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