Re: [xsl] The identity transform and attributes

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> It's certainly not intuitive that when you what to just change the
> attribute's value you have to create a new attribute node 

Intuition is a personal thing but I don't see why that's not
intuitive. xslt never updates nodes in place, so you always generate new
nodes.

Attributes are leaf nodes and work the same way as namespace nodes, and
PI nodes (that is they have a name and value but no children) element
nodes are the only ones to have name and children, document nodes have
children but no name, and comments and text nodes have a value but no
name.

So while it's true that the specific properties of each node type
are different, I don't see anything particularly surprising about
attributes. While it would I suppose be possible to model an attribute
value as a child text node, the behaviour of that child relationship
would be very different from children for document and element nodes:
the child axis would (presumably) have to be constrained to be a single
text node, with other node kinds not being allowed.

David




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