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Bug 1487 - Undocumented incompatibility: sort key = ()
Summary: Undocumented incompatibility: sort key = ()
Status: CLOSED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: XPath / XQuery / XSLT
Classification: Unclassified
Component: XSLT 2.0 (show other bugs)
Version: Last Call drafts
Hardware: PC Windows XP
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Michael Kay
QA Contact: Mailing list for public feedback on specs from XSL and XML Query WGs
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Reported: 2005-05-29 21:15 UTC by Michael Kay
Modified: 2005-07-14 18:48 UTC (History)
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Description Michael Kay 2005-05-29 21:15:57 UTC 
There is an undocumented backwards incompatibility in the handling of sort keys.
In the absence of a data-type attribute

<xsl:sort select="@a"/>
<xsl:sort select="@b"/>

will sort <x b="2"/> after <x a="" b="1"/> in XSLT 1.0, but before it in XSLT
2.0. Specifically, XSLT 1.0 considers an empty sequence to be equal to a
zero-length string in this situation, while XSLT 2.0 considers an empty sequence
to collate before a zero-length string.

Michael Kay
Comment 1 Norman Walsh 2005-06-23 17:23:56 UTC 
At the 23 June telcon, the XSL WG decided that it simply wanted to document this
incompatibility rather than reopen the debate about where () should collate.
Comment 2 Michael Kay 2005-07-14 18:48:20 UTC 
This incompatibility is now documented in the spec.