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Re: your mail
- To: xsl-list at mulberrytech dot com
- Subject: Re: your mail
- From: Mike Brown <mike at skew dot org>
- Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2000 21:29:01 -0600 (MDT)
- Reply-To: xsl-list at mulberrytech dot com
> <xsl:template match="*" />
>
> I was looking at an xsl file; it had the above line and right above it the
> comment:
>
> <!-- The template with match="*" below is a fail-safe. If at any point we
> get to a node in the XML tree that doesn't match any of our template match
> statements, we replace that node with blank space. -->
>
>
> This is in the context of going through an xml file and creating an html
> table. I think I understand what this means, but when (or maybe even why)
> would a condition like this happen? I commented out <xsl:template match="*"
> /> and I still got the same table.
If you understand the processing model of XSLT, whereby processing begins
at the root node and from there everything that happens is a result of
processing templates (some of which may be built-in as prescribed by the
spec), then it should be apparent that the authors of this XSLT document
are simply overriding the built-in template for all elements.
Why would they want to do this? Perhaps because they know that the XML
schema may change, and they don't want any new, unaccounted-for element
types that don't have explicitly matching templates of their own to be
processed by the built-in template.
- Mike
____________________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer at My XML/XSL resources:
webb.net in Denver, Colorado, USA http://www.skew.org/xml/
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