Re: Beginners question: Koala XSL-Engine and <xsl:process select>

[Tyler Baker <tyler@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Prescod wrote:

> Tyler Baker wrote:
> >
> > That is one way of doing things I suppose, but I don't like this at all as it is
> > confusing to deal with.  It still seems silly to have to refer to the root node when
> > only one element of a particular type can be the document element.  Referring to the
> > document element like any other node makes working with the DOM a bit of a kludge
> > since you have to essentially create a dummy node that lives on top of the document
> > element.
>
> It isn't a dummy element. It is the logical holder for document-global
> information: examples include the DTD, the list of entities, the list of
> IDed elements, etc. It turns out that XSL is not powerful enough to use
> any of that information but that doesn't mean that the idea of a "document
> node" separate from an "element node" is a bad one.

Well it is just that it is called a root node to begin with.  If it was called the
document node, then this confusion would not be an issue, but all of this information is
metadata nevertheless and not content.  With respect to processing, the content of the
document is contained only in the document element and all subsequent elements so I still
see no reason why the root node should not be defined as the document element itself as I
would think most newbies to XSL in the future will be able to understand the idea of the
root node being bound to the document element, than some invisible element that is
actually not an element at all (has no attributes, or content, just a single child node).

Tyler


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