RE: Beginners question: Koala XSL-Engine and <xsl:process select>

["Reynolds, Gregg" <greynolds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The same confusion arises from time to time on the DSSSL list.  The
unfortunate fact of the matter is that the language of these standards
sometimes falls short of perfect clarity, and often reflects rather too
well the fact that they were written by computer types.  (The SGML
property set is positively bizarre.)  "Root" is a good example: works
fine as is, if you're looking at a data structure in RAM, but obviously
doesn't work so well in the linguistic domain of most users.  I suggest
"XML-root" or "SGML-root" for the magical ur-element, and
"document-root" for the node most people are interested.  No unqualified
roots allowed.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tyler Baker [mailto:tyler@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 1998 6:30 PM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Beginners question: Koala XSL-Engine and <xsl:process
select>


Paul Prescod wrote:

> Tyler Baker wrote:
> >
> > That is one way of doing things I suppose, but I don't like this at
all as it is
> > confusing to deal with.  It still seems silly to have to refer to
the root node when
> > only one element of a particular type can be the document element.
Referring to the
> > document element like any other node makes working with the DOM a
bit of a kludge
> > since you have to essentially create a dummy node that lives on top
of the document
> > element.
>
> It isn't a dummy element. It is the logical holder for document-global
> information: examples include the DTD, the list of entities, the list
of
> IDed elements, etc. It turns out that XSL is not powerful enough to
use
> any of that information but that doesn't mean that the idea of a
"document
> node" separate from an "element node" is a bad one.

Well it is just that it is called a root node to begin with.  If it was
called the
document node, then this confusion would not be an issue, but all of
this information is
metadata nevertheless and not content.  With respect to processing, the
content of the
document is contained only in the document element and all subsequent
elements so I still
see no reason why the root node should not be defined as the document
element itself as I
would think most newbies to XSL in the future will be able to understand
the idea of the
root node being bound to the document element, than some invisible
element that is
actually not an element at all (has no attributes, or content, just a
single child node).

Tyler


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