Re: Suppressing source tree content

["John E. Simpson" <simpson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:22 AM 4/12/1999 -0700, Sara Mitchell wrote:
>I had a problem like this in the prototype I put together. The
>answer I came up with may not be the most elegant, but it worked
>(at least in LotusXsl which is the tool I was using). I simply
>output a comment instead of outputing the content. It looked like
>this: 
>
><xsl:template match="para[@userlevel='NOVICE']">
> <xsl:comment>Novice level information skipped.
> </xsl:comment>
></xsl:template>
>
>[I] wrote:
>> Is there any way to suppress nodes in the source tree so they're not copied
>> to the result?

I did learn something interesting, which led me to a solution. Looked at
the XSL DTD in the Working Draft; it turns out that the <xsl:template>
element may be empty -- that is, that the inclusion of a template (action)
in the template rule is optional. If you use a match pattern with no
template for the element(s) you want to suppress, then nothing is produced
for those element(s). In the case of your example, this would be:

	<xsl:template match="para[@userlevel='NOVICE']">
	</xsl:template>

Actually, I kind of like your idea of a generated comment for some cases,
as it clearly documents in the result tree that something WAS in the source
but is omitted by intent. Thanks for the suggestion.
=============================================================
John E. Simpson          | It's no disgrace t'be poor, 
simpson@xxxxxxxxxxx      | but it might as well be.
                         |            -- "Kin" Hubbard


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