Ihe,
http://www.biglist.com/lists/lists.mulberrytech.com/xsl-list/archives/201211/msg00170.html
Indeed. You are not the only one to find 'except' to be contrary to
what you expect, in view of its natural-language usage in English.
(D*mned prepositions.)
When reading XPath, my brain more or less automatically assumes
everything is a relative path from the context node (that is, it
traverses the tree relatively until an absolute path is given), so I
mentally translate ($a except $b) as "my $a except my $b". So "my $a
except my 'blah' element children" ($a except blah) doesn't freak me
out.
In English, "breakfast except donuts" should indicate (as you remind
us in that thread) "breakfast except (its) donuts", while I read it as
"(my) breakfast except (my) donuts". Or XPath "$breakfast except
child::donut". (It turns out that being mentally able to translate
abbreviated XPath into long XPath is also a useful skill.)
Or, you can take "except" in its sense not as a preposition but a
transitive verb, such as "he excepted himself on the grounds that he
had already said too much".
Cheers, Wendell
--
Wendell Piez | http://www.wendellpiez.com
XML | XSLT | electronic publishing
Eat Your Vegetables
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