Another DOM and XSL incompatibility?

In the DOM Attributes are not considered children of elements, yet in
XSL it seems that through the pattern matching capabilities the
Attribute nodes are considered to be SubNodes which I interpret as
"children" of element nodes.  There is an easy workaround to make the
change (simply delegate recursive processing from the element node's
children to the attribute nodes children as if the attribute node was
not even there) but I am not so sure from reading the spec if this is
the intended behavior.

In other old spec, you had attribute patterns which could only be the
last component pattern in an ancestry pattern.  That was the rule.

Now you could have something like:

foo/@bar/baz

in a select pattern without this being a formal error.  I suppose all
the XSL Processor would do here is always ignore "baz" since you will
never have an element node as a child of an attribute node.  One thing I
have not found in the spec is whether this should be regarded as an
error or just something that should be ignored as only a fool would try
and add elements to attributes as children.  I am a little confused as
to whether you should select the element which has a "bar" attribute or
whether to select the "bar" attribute itself.  Furthermore, if you do
indeed select the attribute (this is what my interpretation of the draft
says) then what if someone does something like:

foo/@bar/@baz

Should this be legal to or else just ignored...

Anyone have any real insight here as to what is the correct way to do
things?

Thanx,

Tyler


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