RE: [xsl] Constructing Simple Content and Built-in Template Rules

["Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Given to following XML,
> 
> <root>
>   <a>a</a>
>   <b>b</b>
> </root>
> 
> a stylesheet with only one root template with the instruction
> <xsl:apply-templates select="root"/> does the same as a 
> stylesheet with the
> instruction <xsl:value-of select="root"/>, namely: "ab" 
> (neglecting possible whitespaces).
> 
> Is this always correct? 

The effect is the same, but by coincidence rather than by definition. I
think the effect will always be the same if the content is untyped. 

In 2.0 in the presence of a schema, however, doing the recursive descent
with apply-templates will give you the concatenation of the text nodes,
whereas value-of takes the typed value and converts it to a string, which
may be subtly different. In the worst case, if <root> is described in the
schema as an element with element-only content, value-of will fail, because
such an element has no typed value.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/