At 04:02 AM 3/5/2004, you wrote:
Thank you for your help,
As you've understand I'm a beginner. Sorry for this stupid question but I
know I misunderstood something but I didn't know what it was. I think my
understanding of <xsl:apply-templates/> was a little wrong (I still have
something to clarify). Now it's better.
It's a common place to get stuck, and it's good you got stuck there when
you're just starting, since it's also a really important concept and your
XSLT will never be very good until you've gotten your head around it.
The key thing to understand is that classically, XSLT stylesheets do not
control the flow of operations in the transformation. (I say classically
since there are ways of forcing things, but generally this shouldn't be
done unless you need to.) Instead, xsl:apply-templates passes control back
to the source document, by saying "okay now process the next elements
[which are generally the child elements of the node you're on] with
whatever templates are defined for them". This is really powerful, because
it means that documents can have structures of arbitrary complexity, and
yet a simple stylesheet can handle them properly without accounting for
that structure directly. Processing many kinds of XML, such as documentary
data marked up with Docbook or TEI or the NCBI Journal DTD, is next to
impossible without this kind of feature, since many documents will share
the same tags (same element types) without resembling each other
structurally at all.
I'm gonna dip again in a book looking at the right place !!
Cool.
Enjoy,
Wendell
======================================================================
Wendell Piez
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
======================================================================
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list