RE: [xsl] XML Root Element

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

What makes this confusing is "only" terminological.

The term "root" or "root element" was widely used in SGML/XML for the 
outermost element. (Including in the XML Recommendation [2.1].) But when 
XPath was designed, a notional "root" was introduced that contains all 
elements, including this one (plus any top-level comments and PIs, which 
would have no parent in a tree whose root is the document element). Hence 
XSLT makes the distinction between the "root" of its kind of XML document 
tree (which is a node, but not an element) and the "document element", 
which is the only element child of the root in a well-formed XML document 
(and hence can be dependably reached by the XPath "/*").

In the XSLT context it's good practice to avoid confusion by using the 
terms "document element" and "root" (or "root node"), but not "root 
element". Even though the rest of XML does, or used to....

Regards,
Wendell

At 05:13 PM 3/4/2005, Mike wrote:
> The top of the tree is a root node (1.0 terminology) or document node (2.0).
> This is what "/" refers to. It's not an element: it's the parent of the
> outermost element (and any comments and processing instructions that precede
> or follow the outermost element). The root node has no name.
>
> The outermost element can be obtained using /*, and its name is name(/*).


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