Side tracking a bit, is there any differences in the above two? If so, when
  do we use the former?


If you know the element name at the time the stylesheet is written than
you can always do <foo> rather than xsl:element name="foo" the point of
xsl:element is that you can generate element names on the fly eg

<xsl:element name="h{count(ancestor::*)}">

will generate an html h1 or h2 or... depending on how deep we are.

Another use is to generate xslt

<xsl:element name="xsl:value-of">

generates an xsl:value-of in teh result werease <xsl:value-of wiill be
executed as an instruction.

There are some other minor differences related to namespace handling but
they are rarely important.

David


-- 
The LaTeX Companion
  http://www.awprofessional.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0201362996
  http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201362996/202-7257897-0619804


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