Re: Re: _why_ do people use xsl:element and xsl:attrib

  It seems to me that
  teaching people about literal result elements as "text that is
  copied through" rather than as "shorthand for instructions to 
  create nodes --

I agree completely, if we describe it as passing text we can't blame
people if they want to just output an unmatched start tag.

But I think that it _is_ natural to say that a template body can be
viewed as a fragment of the output tree, and that the most natural way
to express a tree structure in XML is to use the standard XML
representation of that tree, thus
<a href="...">...</a>
for an a element with an href attribute. (where actually one uses
xslt/xpath rather than ... to fill out the blanks.

On the other hand the comments from a tool author on the utility of the
more regular xsl:element constructs sounded reasonable, tool generated
sheets, and setting breakpoints etc does seem to have different
requirements/flavour than hand authoring.

David


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