[XML4Lib] Re: ignoring doctype

Sun Oct 29 18:24:27 EST 2006

Eric Lease Morgan wrote:

> I think I can answer my own question:
> 
>    1) HTML snippet above is not accurate. My original content  
> includes an unnamed namespace and looks like this:
> 
>      <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

In fact the XHTML DTD referenced by your DOCTYPE declaration defined an
"xmlns" attribute for the "html" element, with a fixed value of
"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml". So with your DOCTYPE declaration the
elements in the XHTML you quoted would have had a namespace, but without
the DOCTYPE there would have been no namespace.

i.e. with DOCTYPE:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> ...

without DOCTYPE:

<html> ...

>    2) By declaring the namespace in my XSLT the problem goes away:
> 
>      <xsl:stylesheet
>        xmlns:xsl = "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
>        xmlns:h   = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
>        version   = "1.0">
> 
>    3) Last, I need to include the namespace in my templates:
> 
>      <xsl:template match="h:meta">
> 
> Namespaces have always been confusing to me. Sigh.

It's quite a common mistaken belief that a default namespace (i.e. a
namespace used without a prefix) can be matched by XSLT templates which
have the same default namespace. But in fact the "match" attribute of an
XSLT template which is supposed to match a namespaced element must
ALWAYS use a namespace prefix to do so. It makes no difference whether
the input document uses a default (unprefixed) namespace or uses
namespace prefixes. In XSLT you can use a default namespace to unclutter
your output, but it doesn't help at all for input.

Con