If you declare your first template to match / and then work down a lot of 
these problems disappear.
If you want morre information serach for "default templates".
(I think Anthony meant descendant-or-self not ancestor-or-self in his 
explanations.)

-- 

Joe Fawcett (MVP - XML)
http://joe.fawcett.name

"TJ" <TJ@d...> wrote in message 
news:6D6FF40F-AA85-4FE4-A2D4-38D07425B37F@m......
> Hi, Peter,
>  Thanks for your great answer. Also thanks, Anthon Jones , for your great
> answer.
>
> It makes sense in B case...
> Peter, I have one more question in A case...
>
> Just want to make sure whehter my understanding is correct.
>
> So..basically, in A case,  root element(/hello-world) wasn't found in the
> template..so default rule kicks in and traverse the all child nodes..which 
> are
> (greeting and greeter)..
> By match="/hello-world/greeting" statement in A.xsl,  it does match 
> greeting
> child element of hello-world, which is root..so it prints by xsl:value-of
> select..like <div>..</div>....Then greeter is printed by default template
> rule....
>
> Is my understanding correct?
>
> Thanks again,
>
> .....................................................................TJ
>
>
> "Peter Flynn" wrote:
>
>> TJ wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I am trying to understand the difference ....xsl...hum..
>> >
>> > This is A.xsl
>> > <?xml version="1.0"?>
>> > <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
>> > version="1.0">
>> >   <xsl:template match="/hello-world/greeting">
>> >     <div><xsl:value-of select="."/></div>
>> >   </xsl:template>
>> > </xsl:stylesheet>
>> >
>> > This is B.xsl
>> > <?xml version="1.0"?>
>> > <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
>> > version="1.0">
>> >   <xsl:template match="/hello-world">
>> >     <div><xsl:value-of select="greeting/text()"/></div>
>> >   </xsl:template>
>> > </xsl:stylesheet>
>> >
>> > I tested these two xsl with this xml.
>> >
>> > This is A.xml
>> > <?xml version="1.0"?>
>> > <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="A.xsl"?>
>> > <hello-world>
>> >    <greeting>Hello, World!</greeting>
>> >    <greeter>An XSLT Programmer</greeter>
>> > </hello-world>
>> >
>> > This is B.XML
>> > <?xml version="1.0"?>
>> > <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="B.xsl"?>
>> > <hello-world>
>> >    <greeting>Hello, World!</greeting>
>> >    <greeter>An XSLT Programmer</greeter>
>> > </hello-world>
>> >
>> > It produce different results in IE7.
>> > A.XML output
>> >    Hello, World!
>> >    An XSLT Programmer
>> >
>> > B.XML output
>> >    Hello, World!
>> >
>> > It looks to me that two xsl should produce
>> > same output.....hum...
>> > Can anybody explain this?
>>
>> In XSL, if there is no template matching an element type, it will be
>> assumed to equate to an "apply-templates" directive. Here, there is no
>> template matching the document root ("/"), so it will proceed to look
>> for a template matching the root element type (in your example,
>> "hello-world").
>>
>> In A.xsl, there is no template matching "hello-world", so using the same
>> default rule, it will be assumed to equate to an "apply-templates"
>> directive and will walk down the tree to the first subelement,
>> "greeting", where it will test and apply the same rule, and find that a
>> template for this element type *does* exist, and it says to add the
>> string value (".") of any text or elements below this point. (In fact
>> this template doesn't need to be quite so specific in its match, just
>> "greeting" would have done; the effect of the value-of for "." means
>> that if there had been any further nested subelements inside greeting,
>> they would have been stripped of their markup and the whole content of
>> greeting concatenated and output as a simple string). Having exhausted
>> depth, the processor moves sideways to the next sibling element type,
>> "greeter". There is no template to match this, so as there are no nested
>> subelements, the text content of greeter is added to the output tree.
>>
>> However, in B.xsl, there *is* a match for the root element. It doesn't
>> need to be quite so explicit, just "hello-world" would have done,
>> without the slash. In this case, the template says to add the value of
>> all the text in the "greeting" subelement to the output tree, which it
>> does. This template does not specify any further processing, so as there
>> is nothing left to look at, the processing stops here. The greeting
>> element and the greeter element, will never *themselves* get processed
>> as such, either explicitly (looking for a matching template) NOR
>> implicitly (using the default template) because while the current
>> context was "hello-world", a template *was* found (whereas in A.xsl it
>> was not), and once a template matches, no further
>> searching-for-templates occurs *for that element*: only what is
>> specifies in the matching template will get done, nothing more. And in
>> this case, as the element in question was the root element (of which
>> only one can exist), that's all, folks.
>>
>> ///Peter
>> -- 
>> XML FAQ: http://xml.silmaril.ie/
>>