weird namespace thing happening

Martijn · January 24th, 2007, 12:32 PM

I'm using XSLT via AxKit to process a bunch of XML files into HTML. The code isn't written by me, but I'm trying to understand what it does. Most of it makes sense but there is one weird thing happening.

At some point I call a certain template using

Code:

<xsl:call-template name="..">

Now within the html-output of this template, all the outer html-tags have five extra namespace declarations (e.g. xmlns:xsp="http://apache.org/xsp/core/v1" ). It even happens if I let the template simply display <b>test</b>. From the html-code it makes no sense, the rest of the html validates* and anything just before or after the <xsl:call-template>-tag works fine too. More <xsl:call-template>-tags are used in the xsl-document(s) and they all work fine.

Anyone got any clue what can go wrong?

* well, except for a namespace declaration in the <html>-tag, which I can't get rid of either. But that's not my major concern right now.

joefawcett · January 24th, 2007, 12:36 PM

Sounds like you need to use exclude-result-prefixes on the xsl:stylesheet element.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

mhkay · January 24th, 2007, 12:41 PM

Hard to tell exactly without seeing your stylesheet, but remember that when you use a literal result element, all the namespaces declared in the stylesheet in the scope of that LRE are copied to the result tree unless you exclude them using exclude-result-prefixes.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

Martijn · January 24th, 2007, 01:43 PM

Thanks for your fast reply, both! It helped a lot and pointed me in the right direction.

I have solved the problem by adding an attribute extension-element-prefixes* whose value is a list of all the namespace names, to the <xsl:stylesheet>-tags. Tags, in plural, as the call-template-thing that went wrong was in an included XSL-document. (Apparently, not everything in this document got these weird namespace-attributes, something which still puzzles me, but I'll scrutinize that bit later.)

Just to make sure, this won't do any harm to the website, right?

* http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XSLTreferenc...-prefixes.html

mhkay · January 24th, 2007, 01:55 PM

>Just to make sure, this won't do any harm to the website, right?

If your output document uses namespaces only in element and attribute names, then there's no risk in excluding namespace declarations. The system will ignore your request if the result document actually needs the namespace.

But if your output includes things like xsi:type="xs:integer", where the "xs" prefix appears not in an element or attribute name but in content, then excluding the xs namespace would be fatal.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

joefawcett · January 25th, 2007, 05:06 AM

On top of Michael's advice if you want to output XHTML then you'll need to keep that one although exclude-result-prefixes won't exclude a default namespace or one that is actually used, it only excludes unused prfix/namespace mappings.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

Martijn · January 26th, 2007, 01:00 PM

Well, it works now. Thanks (again) :)