This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
Editorial. In section 20.2, the semantics of disable-output-escaping are explained by introducing a property called "disable-escaping" that is associated with every character in the result tree. In the following paragraph, this property is then referred to as "disable-output".
A slightly more substantial comment: there is a contradiction in the specification on how sticky disable-output-escaping is handled. Section 20.2 says normatively: "If output escaping is disabled for an xsl:value-of or xsl:text instruction evaluated when temporary output state is in effect, the request to disable output escaping is ignored." But clause 20 of J.1.4 says non-normatively: "An erratum to XSLT 1.0 specified what has become known as "sticky disable-output-escaping": specifically, that it should be possible to use disable-output-escaping when writing a node to a temporary tree, and that this information would be retained for use when the same node was later copied to a final result tree and serialized. XSLT 2.0 no longer specifies this behavior (though it permits it, at the discretion of the implementation)." I think the final phrase in parentheses is wrong: 20.2 says that d-o-e is ignored when writing to a variable, not that the effect is implementation-defined.
As agreed by the XSL WG on 2009-01-29, erratum E32 has been drafted to make these editorial corrections. The bug is therefore being marked fixed and closed.