The XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 specs are both explicit that you can't create a
namespace node by pretending that it's an attribute called xmlns:thing.

In 2.0 you can create a namespace node in the result tree using the new
xsl:namespace instruction.

In 1.0 you have to do what docbook is doing, and copy it from a source tree
or temporary tree.

(XQuery, incidentally, doesn't provide any way of doing this. I couldn't
persuade them it was needed. Saxon XQuery has an extension to do it,
though).

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Pawson [mailto:davep@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 31 May 2005 18:59
> To: Xsl List
> Subject:  namespace generation in the output.
> 
> Problem. I was writing a stylesheet to produce another stylesheet.
> I wanted all elements output from the second stylesheet,
> which were literal content to be in a specific namespace
> 
> I knew the docbook stylesheets did this to produce xhtml,
> and yet Saxon kept finding out I was cheating!
> 
> <xsl:element name="xsl:stylesheet">
> etc
> 
> when I tried any variant of 
> <xsl:attribute name="xslns">
>  ....
> 
> Saxon realised what I was doing and (correctly) told me not to.
> 
> Then I found this in the docbook stylesheets :-)
> 
> 
> <xsl:element name="xsl:stylesheet">
>   <xsl:variable name="a">
>       <xsl:element name="dummy"
> namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/>
>   </xsl:variable>
>     <xsl:copy>
>       <xsl:copy-of select="exsl:node-set($a)//namespace::*"/>
>       <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
>       <xsl:apply-templates/>
>    </xsl:copy>
> </xsl:template>
> 
> 
> which simply copies over the namespace from the variable just 
> declared,
> which means that the stylesheet produced puts all literal content into
> the xhtml namespace.
> 
> 
> I thought it a clever way to achieve what is now
> doable in xslt 2.0 (I'm sure MK or DC will tell us how :-)
> 
> This is an xslt 1.0 solution.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Regards, 
> 
> Dave Pawson
> XSLT + Docbook FAQ
> http://www.dpawson.co.uk