[xsl] Some basic things

["ashu t" <aashut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here are some things which i am little confused about.
(1)
<xsl:apply-templates/> and
<xsl:apply-templates select="*"/>
are they not same?
I have read about this on this 
linkshttp://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#strip
http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#section-Applying-Template-Rules
but I am bit confused as select ="*" will not process text node ?? 
or it will process?
(2)
And one other thing is about overriding template rule :
If i write <xsl:template match="some node"/>
then what does it do
(1)It will not process this node and move to process nodes which 
are children of it. or
(2)It will leave all the nodes unprocessed between
<some node> and </some node> and move to next node to process

(3)
And if we have more than one predicate in some template match 
like
<xsl:template match 
="text()[preceding-sibling::node()[1][self::input][not(normalize-space())]]
then how we interpre it (from left to right or right to left)

May be these are very basic things and should be known to every 
one but i am not getting it correctly while reading material on w3 
site.
can any one explain this
ashu

XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list