> But they have to pay the price of vastly increased complexity 
> in the specification (and one assumes in the text books that 
> will follow).

If they were paying, either for the specs or for the products, then they
might have more ability to influence the outcome...

> 
> As the conformance levels are not specified it's hard to 
> comment on them but it would seem likely given the current 
> XSLT draft that given a document and a stylesheet which does 
> not refer to a schema explictly a schema-aware  XSLT engine 
> will produce different results (because it sees vastly 
> different input) than a non-schema aware processor...

Yes, this is likely. We're exploring this area at the moment: for
example there are suggestions that a stylesheet should be able to say
whether it requires to use a schema-aware (or non-schema-aware)
processor, to ensure interoperable results.

Note that we already have this in a very basic form with ID attributes
in XSLT 1.0; these will be recognized by the id() function or not,
depending on the XML parser you use. 

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 



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