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Re: [xsl] question about identity transform

2006-11-02 09:15:40
Dimitre Novatchev wrote:
The order in which an <xsl:apply-templates> instruction is applied on
the nodes selected by the expression as specified in its select
attribute is not defined and may be in any order.
Surely it's misleading to say that the processing order is "not defined". From a user's perspective, how is it helpful to make a distinction between processing order and result order? If we, as users, can't use the word "process" (because it's reserved for implementation details) then what word do we use?

I haven't implemented an XSLT processor, but when is this distinction even useful, in practice?

I could say that it's undefined what order the XSLT processor processes the nodes in and whether or not it first translates them to Swahili and back. The important thing is that the result is "as if" it was processed in document order (and not translated to another human language)... Is there something about processing nodes in document order that seems so inefficient that we have to go out of our way to make this distinction?

Evan

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