Re: [xsl] When to use text()

[David Sewell <dsewell@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wonder how much of the problem (and there is one, at least for beginning users 
of XPath/XQuery/XSLT, and it even bites old hands sometimes) is owing to the 
fact that the XPath syntax for an axis step followed by a node type is identical 
to the syntax for an axis step followed by a single-argument function.

	$node/text()

looks just like

	$node/string()

even though the underlying semantics are quite different. I suspect that 
mentally one tends to conflate the two. (Applying the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to 
programming languages, i.e. the way a language encodes things influences the 
way we think about them.)

David


On Fri, 21 Mar 2014, Ihe Onwuka wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 2:20 PM, Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > To gloss Mike ...
> >
> > Yes, text() is over-used and commonly misused.
>
> I wouldn't be blaming the programmers for that.
>
> When you step back, it is clear from all the explanations given, that
> the thing doesn't do what it says on the tin.

--
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400314, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4314 USA
Email: dsewell@xxxxxxxxxxxx   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/