Re: [xsl] is there really a need for location steps of ".."?

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert,

At 12:05 PM 3/12/2003, you wrote:
> my original question was based
> more on aesthetics than efficiency.

Aesthetics is certainly a worthy concern.

> it just struck me as curious that so many of the examples
> i saw in the docs i was reading insisted on creating paths
> that involved "backing up" to parents or ancestors, that's
> all.

This may be due in part to the manuals' interest in demonstrating how XPath 
allows you to walk all over the tree when you build location paths with 
multiple steps. This needs to be demonstrated in the books but it could be 
that in Real Life it's just a bit less common to need to do this than one 
might expect (though occasions are certainly not unheard of especially for 
ill-designed source formats). Examples cooked for demonstration aren't 
really coming from the same direction as RL examples: oddly, in the books 
the author actually has a legitimate reason to say "look you can use this 
complicated thing", which may sometimes obscure a simpler solution to the 
problem (artificially) posed.

>   i was just taking it as a challenge to rewrite such
> paths using the second form.

It's a worthwhile challenge.

The axes and their application are redundant by design, and of course it's 
always possible to say

../*/..

to get one's parent (and other such silliness) -- much more egregious than 
what you've found -- and yet believe it or not stuff like that occasionally 
turns up in the wild.

For example, some XSLTers apparently think they need to do

<xsl:template match="//element">
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

possibly because they haven't quite clicked with the distinction between 
matching and selecting that Lars and Jeni are talking about back over in 
that there other thread.

Cheers,
Wendell


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