Re: [xml-dev] Towards XML 2.0

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 05/12/2010 17:54, G. Ken Holman wrote:
> At 2010-12-04 23:33 +0000, Michael Kay wrote:
>> For a comment syntax, what's wrong with <xml:comment>....</xml:comment>?
>
> Why I would never support that syntax for a comment is that today when 
> I say:
>
> <xsl:apply-templates select="*"/>
>
> ... I know I'm getting *only* my XML content and not any comments that 
> might be injected by the user.
>

Well, a lot of people write XSLT code today that doesn't work as 
intended if the source document happens to contain comments in 
unexpected places. (This is even more true for XQuery because of the 
unfortunate habit of using "/text()" in many early tutorials.) And the 
bug sits there undetected for years.

A better way to control this would be

<xsl:source-comments retain="yes|no"/>

to control whether comments in the source document should be visible to 
the stylesheet or not. That's true whatever the comment syntax you choose.

Michael Kay
Saxonica