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Re: A parentless element that is not the document node - how?

• To: costello@m...
• Subject: Re: A parentless element that is not the document node - how?
• From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>
• Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 15:18:50 +0100
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <3F2E5174.25855B84@m...> (costello@m...)
• References: <3F2E5174.25855B84@m...>

  The XSLT 2.0 spec talks about "parentless elements".  As far as I know,
  there can only be one element in a source document that is parentless -
  the document node.  Yet, the XSLT 2.0 spec seems to suggest that there
  may be other parentless element nodes.  Can someone tell me what they
  may be?  /Roger

There can be _no_ elements in a document that is parentless.
Every element in a document has parent another element or the document
(root) node /.  XPath 2 (like Xpath 1) actually allows more than 1
element to have parent /, as it models external parsed entities rarther
than documents.

In XQuery and XSLT2 though  You can create element nodes without
putting them in a document

something like (from memory)
<xsl:element as="item()" name="foo"/>
in XSLT2 or just
<foo/>
in xquery will generate a free standing element node.

You can manipulate these nodes before finally copyting them to an output
document (at which point they'l aquire a parent) The systems may give
you API to directly output such thing s(as well as values such as
integers, which don't have any obvious XML serialisation, but I don't
think that's standardised in the current drafts. The main use anyway
will be as internal data manipulated within a query.

David



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• References:
  • A parentless element that is not the document node - how?
    • From: "Roger L. Costello" <costello@m...>

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