Re: The identity transform and attributes

On 21/01/2008, David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It's certainly not intuitive that when you what to just change the
attribute's value you have to create a new attribute node

Intuition is a personal thing but I don't see why that's not
intuitive. xslt never updates nodes in place, so you always generate new
nodes.

Sure, but I meant along the lines of copy vs create... To update an
element's "value" you tend to copy it rather than create a new one.
To update an attribute's value I would say it's intuitive to try the
same approach, especially when the name and value are clearly separate
(to me!).

Attributes are leaf nodes and work the same way as namespace nodes, and
PI nodes (that is they have a name and value but no children) element
nodes are the only ones to have name and children, document nodes have
children but no name, and comments and text nodes have a value but no
name.

I've been caught out before doing things like:

<xsl:template match="@*[not(self::foo)]">

...which doesn't work - you have to use name()

Again, I don't know why the self axis isn't available for attribute
nodes... any ideas?

Cheers,
-- Abel --