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We have a mechanism <output tree="no"/> to indicate that the result of a transformation should not be turned into a tree by applying sequence normalization. However, in this case the test assertions still rely on binding the result as the context item, which doesn't work if the result is a sequence. It is therefore impossible to test stylesheets that return a non-singleton sequence as their result. This also makes it difficult to convert QT3 tests, which often return a sequence as the result. In QT3, assertions refer to this sequence as $result. I propose to introduce the option <output tree="no" result-var="result"/> to indicate that the result of the stylesheet is bound to the variable $result rather than to the context item.
Closing old bug. I agree. I've seen this change applied and I've updated test drivers to use this, the approach seems logical to me.
> <output tree="no" result-var="result"/> For posterity, the documentation reads currently that the value can be yes/no. The XSD shows an xs:NCName, and I found one usage in the test sets, value "result" for $result. I'll update the documentation according to the current usage.