No, the new drafts are less strict.

The reasons for this are mainly to do with XPath and friends being used in a
much wider range of environments, e.g. to access non-XML data or XML
databases.

Actually, XSLT 1.0 is a little ambiguous on this. It does recognize that the
source tree can be constructed by various routes, it is not necessarily the
direct result of parsing a source XML document. It mentions source trees
derived from a DOM as a specific example. XSLT 2.0 says the same thing much
more explicitly: you can construct a tree any way you like. Or any way your
vendor likes. Most vendors are forced into line by market forces, but some
seem to be able to sell their products regardless.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dimtre Novatchev [mailto:dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 02 November 2004 03:56
> To: mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [xsl] Collapsing run-on tag chains not working 
> in saxon or xalan
> 
> > Without reading further, this is almost certainly because Microsoft
> > (incorrectly, or at least stretching what the spec allows) 
> strips whitespace
> > text nodes from the document by default.
> 
> Are/will the newest XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 draft specifications be
> more strict not to allow such widely different interpretations?
> 
> If not, what are the reasons for this and also which are the 
> areas to watch for?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Dimitre.