xmlns attribute

[shankar vembu]

Hi,
I have an xslt that does an xml-xml transformation. I basically replace a few tags in my source xml file with other tags in my target xml. But in my target xml file, the attribute xmlns="" is getting added to all the new tags that are created.Example:

 
Source
-------
<presentation version="1.0" xmlns='http://www.dstc.edu.au/ns/2002/JackSVG/presentation'
 xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink'
.............
<!-- some data-->
<oldtag/>
...........
Target/output
-------------
<presentation version="1.0" xmlns='http://www.dstc.edu.au/ns/2002/JackSVG/presentation'
 xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink'
.............
<!-- some data-->
<newtag xmlns=""/>
...........
 

But when I remove the xmlns attribute from the root element, it works fine. What am I missing here and why is this happening?
Thank you,
shankar

[Lasse Koskela]

The XSLT Specification says the following about <xsl:element> (I assume you're using xsl:element) :

If the namespace attribute is present, then it also is interpreted as an attribute value template. The string that results from instantiating the attribute value template should be a URI reference. It is not an error if the string is not a syntactically legal URI reference. If the string is empty, then the expanded-name of the element has a null namespace URI. Otherwise, the string is used as the namespace URI of the expanded-name of the element to be created. The local part of the QName specified by the name attribute is used as the local part of the expanded-name of the element to be created.

It is not said clearly (at least in my opinion) here but I guess you need to explicitly specify the namespace for your new element or it will be set to "".
[ June 19, 2003: Message edited by: Lasse Koskela ]