Re: [xsl] separating 'dirty' text nodes

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Antonio,

At 02:06 PM 1/27/2005, you wrote:
> This is waht is called a "identity transform" used when one wants to
> transform a tree to another with small changes in it (am i correct?)

Close.

An identity transform works to transform an input tree into a copy of itself.

There are two ways of accomplishing this: by simply copying the whole tree 
(xsl:copy-of select="/"), and by traversing the tree one node at a time in 
the usual way (<xsl:apply-templates/>), copying it as you go.

The latter version is the more useful one, since it also allows you to 
match particular nodes to modify them, instead of simply copying them. 
Accordingly it's what is usually meant in the literature as "the identity 
transform". An example of such a transform appears by that name in the XSLT 
1.0 Recommendation [http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt, section 7.5], and its single 
template is sometimes called "the identity template".

Since they're not quite exactly identity transforms themselves, I call 
modifications of this useful stylesheet (i.e., that use the identity 
template for most nodes, and override it for some) "near-identity 
transforms" (so I don't have to say "a modified version of the identity 
transform" all the time :-).

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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