Saxon » Saxon-CE

I suspect the problem is with the HTML DOM. It's not clear from your description exactly what you are doing, but namespace handling in the HTML DOM is pretty much a no-go area. XML "islands" in HTML are very patchily supported in different browsers and I think GWT (which provides the abstraction layer that we use) doesn't support them at all.

So I think we need a clearer description of exactly what you are doing and what you are actually trying to achieve - where do you want this HTML with "Backbase XML" (something I am unfamiliar with) to end up? Are we talking about the HTML of the browser page, or something else?

A further note on this for future reference. GWT offers two DOM implementations, one for XML and one for HTML. Originally we used the XML implementation when writing XML, the HTML one for HTML. We now use the HTML DOM in both cases, but with a flag so we behave differently depending whether we are writing HTML or XML. This bug fix makes use of this flag to change the way namespaces are handled in XML mode. I think the primary reason for this was to make the returned Document object accessible to Javascript code. For use cases where there's a pipeline of transformations and the XML is going to be fed straight back into Saxon, we probably shouldn't be using either DOM implementation, but should use Saxon's internal LinkedTree instead, which will be much faster to process when it's read back in. So perhaps we should add a transformToXdm() method that returns an opaque JS object which can only be used by supplying it back to another Saxon interface.