OASIS Developer Questionnaire

Discretionary behavior in '<strong>XSL Transformations (XSLT)</strong>' and '<strong>XPath</strong>'

Questionnaire for XSLT processor developers

The XSLT and XPath Recommendations were written in hopes that XML data could be transformed as needed by the products of many vendors. Builders of Web sites should be able to use tools to create XSLT stylesheets regardless of the XSLT processor that will ultimately execute the styling. The OASIS XSLT/XPath test suite is the most comprehensive measure of the necessary interoperability.

As a developer trying to meet the W3C Recommendations, you know how the verbiage of the Recommendations contains precisely-stated provisions that interlock in complex and sometimes surprising ways. There are also cases where you have leeway to choose one of two allowable behaviors or decide output details. Below is our questionnaire about the choices. We want you to specify the choices you made when creating your XSLT processor. You are encouraged to post the answers on your own Web site as well as sending them to us. When you prepare to use our test suite, an XML document containing your answers is used to filter out test cases that assume the other choice, leaving a rendition that is custom-fit to your processor insofar as allowed by the Recommendations.

Conformance to the Recommendations is tested by running thousands of small test cases, each with processor inputs and an expected output. Comparison of actual and expected output neutralizes all details that have been defined as irrelevant by the XML, InfoSet, Namespaces, and XSLT Recommendations. There is no reason to think that all tests have equal weight, hence we discourage talk of percentages of conformance and the like. If you have some tests that you would like to be included in a later edition of our suite, see howtosub.htm for submission instructions.

What happens when there is an unresolved conflict between matches to xsl:strip-space and xsl:preserve-space elements? (choices: choose-last, raise-error)
What happens when there is an unresolved conflict between matches to xsl:template elements? (choices: choose-last, raise-error)
What happens when a namespace URI is declared to be an alias for multiple different namespace URIs and the declarations share the highest import precedence? (choices: choose-last, raise-error)
What happens when the result of instantiating the name attribute of the xsl:element element is not a QName? (choices: pass-through, raise-error)
What happens when the result of instantiating the name attribute of the xsl:attribute element is not a QName? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when an attribute is added to an element after children have been added to it? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when an attribute is added to a node that is not an element? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when nodes other than text nodes are created when instantiating the content of the xsl:attribute element? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when two attribute sets that have the same expanded name and share the highest import precedence both contain the same attribute? (choices: choose-last, raise-error)
What happens when the result of instantiating the name attribute of the xsl:processing-instruction element is not an NCName and a PITarget? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when nodes other than text nodes are created when instantiating the content of the xsl:processing-instruction element? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when the result of instantiating the content of the xsl:processing-instruction element contains the string ?>? (choices: add-space, raise-error)
What happens when nodes other than text nodes are created when instantiating the content of the xsl:comment element? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when the result of instantiating the content of the xsl:comment element contains the string -- or ends with -? (choices: add-space, raise-error)
What happens when instantiating a variable-binding element adds an attribute node or namespace node as a child of the root of the result tree fragment? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when a namespace is copied to a node that is not an element? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when a namespace is copied to an element after children have been added to it? (choices: ignore, raise-error)
What happens when xsl:number is given NaN, Infinity, or a non-positive number? (choices: pass-through, raise-error)
What happens when there is an error retreiving the resouce identified by a URI in an argument to the document function? (choices: return-empty, raise-error)
What-happens when there is an error processing the fragment identifier in a URI in an argument to the document function? (choices: return-empty, raise-error)
What happens when the two arguments to the document() function do not enable resolution of a relative URI reference? (choices: return-empty, raise-error)
What happens when there is more than one instantiation of the same attribute on multiple xsl:output elements that share the highest import precedence? (choices: choose-last, raise-error)
Is an error raised when the encoding attribute of the xsl:output element specifies an unsupported encoding? (choices: yes, no)
Is UTF-8 encoding always used when the encoding attribute of the xsl:output element specifies an unsupported encoding? (choices: yes, no)
Is UTF-16 encoding always used when the encoding attribute of the xsl:output element specifies an unsupported encoding? (choices: yes, no)
Is UTF-8 encoding used by default? (choices: yes, no)
Is UTF-16 encoding used by default? (choices: yes, no)
Does the processor support disabling output escaping? (choices: yes, no)
What happens when disabling output escaping of an xsl:value-of or xsl:text element is specified but disabling of output escaping is unsupported? (choices: ignore, raise-error, moot)
What happens when output escaping is disabled for a text node that is used for something other than a text node in the result tree? (choices: ignore, raise-error, moot)
What happens when output escaping is disabled for a character that is not representable in the encoding used for output? (choices: ignore, raise-error, moot)
Is the public identifier of an unparsed entity, when present, used to generate the URI for the entity instead of the URI specified in the system identifier? (choices: yes, no)
Is the English language supported for xsl:number? (choices: yes, no)
(Pattern for questions) For each language in test suite: Is _____ language supported for xsl:number?
(Pattern for questions) For some specific languages: ELABORATE: which number conversion basis is chosen?
Is the English language supported for xsl:sort? (choices: yes, no)
(Pattern for questions) For each language in test suite: Is _____ language supported for xsl:sort?
(Pattern for questions) For some specific languages: ELABORATE: which sorting algorithm is chosen?
Is it possible to pass parameters to the stylesheet? (choices: yes, no) If yes: What is the API? What is the command-line syntax?
Is the result tree able to be output as a sequence of bytes? (choices: yes, no)
Is the result tree always output as specified by the xsl:output element? (choices: yes, no, moot) If no: What deviations do you implement?
What happens when output escaping is disabled for a text node that is placed into a result tree fragment (RTF), and the RTF is later converted to a number or string? (choices: ignore, raise-error, moot)
Are there any non-terminating loops that can be detected? (choices: yes, no) If yes: What loops can be detected?
Is the prefix of the QName specified in the name attribute of xsl:element used as the prefix of the created element, when no conflicting use is in scope? (choices: yes, no)
Is the prefix of the QName specified in the name attribute of xsl:attribute used as the prefix of the created attribute, when no conflicting use is in scope? (choices: yes, no)
Is the relative document order of two nodes in different documents formed by taking all elements in the first document before any in the second, and so on? (choices: yes, no) If no: How is the ordering determined?
Is there a reproducible pattern for the string generated by the generate-id function? (choices: yes, no) If yes: What is the pattern?
Does the XML output ever contain namespace nodes that were not present in the result tree? (choices: yes, no) If yes: Under what circumstances are additional namespace nodes generated?
Does the html output method output a character using a character entity reference, if one is defined for it in the version of HTML that the output method is using? (choices: yes, no)
ELABORATE: What form of error recovery is performed after any errors are signaled?
Are limits imposed on processing resources consumed by the processing of a stylesheet? (choices: yes, no) If yes: What limits might be reached in lab testing?
Does the XSLT processor support any extra data-type for sort? (choices: yes, no) If yes: What additional data types are supported?