Re: [xsl] Apply-templates - how to omit top level element tags?

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike,

At 06:06 PM 9/8/2005, David wrote:

>                                 <h1>
>                                         <!-- THIS IS WHAT I NEEDED -->
>                                         <xsl:apply-templates
> select="Name/node()"/>
>                                 </h1>
>
>
> That works but makes things look a lot more complicated than need be.
> You probably just want to replace all that by
> <xsl:apply-templates select="Name"/>
>
> and have
> <xsl:template match="Guide/Name">
>  <h1><xsl:apply-templates/></h1>
> </xsl:template>
>
> That's probably a more natural xslt coding style.

... and it would implicitly override your identity template (the one 
matching "@*|node()", which would get rid of that problem -- so your 
stylesheet would "just work" had you had this template.

OTOH, you couldn't have known this. Another vital detail in the XSLT 
processing model: how the processor decides among templates when more than 
one template (oops: "template rule"; see below) matches a given node. In 
this case, a template that matches "node()" (any node) and one that matches 
"Guide/Name" (a name element child of a Guide element) both would match 
your Name. The processor sees this and chooses the latter as a "better 
match". (The reason: the rules for template matching assign it a priority 
of 1, while the template matching "node()" has a priority of -0.5....)

BTW, a "template rule" is that construct we generally call a "template". No 
one knows this or bothers to observe it, but "templates" are the *content* 
of template rules ... templates also appear inside xsl:for-each instructions.

I'm a secularist too, but I'm willing to be just as persnickety as any 
religionist if it helps get the job done. Not persnickety for its own sake, 
mind you. :-)

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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