Question

Is possible to drop the xsl: to XSL tags in XSL Stylesheets?

For example, could:

<xsl:if test=''>

be typed as:

<if test=''>

Edit:
Stylesheet has HTML and XML nodes within it.

Thanks,
Ross

Answer 1

Sure you can, but combining @ysdx and @Jon’s answers, beware that your XSLT processor needs to differentiate between XSLT elements and output elements. For example, the following stylesheet throws an error in Firefox:

<stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <template match="/">
        <!-- <b> is not a valid XSLT element -->
        <b><value-of select="'test'"/></b>
    </template>
</stylesheet>

Which means you need to qualify the names of output elements, like this:

<stylesheet version="1.0" 
         xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
         xmlns:test="http://whatever">
    <template match="/">
        <test:b><value-of select="'test'"/></test:b>
    </template>
</stylesheet>

This can be problematic. You should stick to the conventional xsl prefix, unless you can think of a good reason not to.