Saxon » Saxon-CE

To test prevention of default behaviour I used the following template:

<xsl:template match="a" mode="ixsl:onclick">
   <xsl:result-document href="#main" method="append-content">
   <p>clicked item</p>
   </xsl:result-document>
<xsl:sequence select="ixsl:call(ixsl:event(),'preventDefault')"/>
</xsl:template>

This was used with the anchor element:

<a href="http://saxonica.com">Default</a>

The expected behaviour is for the xsl:template to modify the output - in this case append a paragraph to the #main div element - but to prevent the default behaviour where the browser would navigate to the URI within the href attribute. This worked successfully for the Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE9 browsers - so I suspect that the issue you're experiencing is associated with the use of xsl:variable to cause this side-effect (it is not advisable to rely on xsl:message executing because this may be removed from code accidentally and also this code may not execute under certain circumstances - eg. if logging is disabled).

One issue that does arise from this test however is that the 'preventDefault' method is not supported by Internet Explorer 8 and previous versions. To get the same effect in JavaScript one would have to return false from the event handler. In XSLT we currently can't emulate this, so current thinking is a new 'ixsl:prevent-default' attribute for xsl:template - for example:

<xsl:template match="a" mode="ixsl:onclick" ixsl:prevent-default="yes">
   <xsl:result-document href="#main" method="append-content">
      <p>clicked item</p>
   </xsl:result-document>
</xsl:template>

Bug fixed for Saxon-CE version 1.1 release