Altova Mailing List Archives>Archive Index >xsl-list Archive Home >Recent entries >Thread Prev - [xsl] alternative to repeatedly walking the ancestor axis in 1.0 [Thread Next] RE: [xsl] alternative to repeatedly walking the ancestor axis in 1.0To: Date: 8/2/2008 8:34:00 AM > Out of interest, does xml:lang annotate the input tree, or does the > lang() function walk the ancestor axis behind the scenes? Or > is it all implementation dependent? It's implementation-dependent, of course. Saxon walks the ancestor axis when you use the lang() function. I think it's used too rarely to be worth optimizing. You also asked: >why does xml:lang exist And I think the answer is that the I18N lobby is sufficiently powerful in W3C that they overrode the architectural arguments for putting this kind of thing in a different layer; XML should be completely neutral as to the meaning of element and attribute names, and such things should be defined only in application-specific vocabularies. (But it's true, of course, that xml:lang is permitted only where the DTD says it is permitted, so in that sense it's not part of core XML, it's just available for inclusion in an application vocabulary if you choose to include it.) Michael Kay http://www.saxonica.com/ | ||||||
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