At 12:30 PM 7/1/2008, you wrote:
> Actually, as Ken said, to write the attribute value you should use
> xsl:value-of. xsl:apply-templates should not work: if it does, your
> processor is not being conformant, and your code will break in
> another processor.

actually the default template for attributes does the same as value-of
in this case.

Yes, but if you apply templates when matching an attribute, there are 
no nodes to apply templates to:



<xsl:template match="@*">
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

If you apply templates to an attribute, you get its value (by default).



<xsl:template match="*">
  <xsl:apply-templates select="@*/>
</xsl:template>

(Maybe this was what was meant, in which case I apologize for 
confusing things, and thanks for the clarification in any case.)



> Sometimes they bend the rules and introduce some
> sort of structure into attribute values, but when they do, it's
> always simple enough to parse easily (for example tokenized values,
> or maybe tokenized values with labels), since this generally has to
> be done in the application not by the XML parser.

Of course it is possible to parse reasonably complicated "quoted html in
attributes" just using xslt if you want to avoid extension functions.
Just bash the attribute value with enough regular expressions and
generate some element nodes... (see htmlparse.xsl for some examples of
this).

But this isn't something I would wish on a beginner. You have to be 
both adept at plain-text processing and at composing complex logic in XSLT.



BTW, I take it you mean XSLT 2.0, for those regexps w/o extension?



I dare say even an expert will put the code into a library so it 
doesn't have to be redone. :-)



Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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