Subject: RE: Beginners question: Koala XSL-Engine and <xsl:process select> From: "Reynolds, Gregg" <greynolds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 19:02:32 -0500 |
The same confusion arises from time to time on the DSSSL list. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the language of these standards sometimes falls short of perfect clarity, and often reflects rather too well the fact that they were written by computer types. (The SGML property set is positively bizarre.) "Root" is a good example: works fine as is, if you're looking at a data structure in RAM, but obviously doesn't work so well in the linguistic domain of most users. I suggest "XML-root" or "SGML-root" for the magical ur-element, and "document-root" for the node most people are interested. No unqualified roots allowed. -----Original Message----- From: Tyler Baker [mailto:tyler@xxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, October 22, 1998 6:30 PM To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Beginners question: Koala XSL-Engine and <xsl:process select> 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 XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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