On Thu, Nov 01 2007 19:32:24 +0000, Scott.Trenda@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> I think I was trying to ask, is the template content of a variable
> treated as its own document? It would make sense if it were,
> considering

XSLT 1.0 [1] says:

   A result tree fragment represents a fragment of the result tree. A
   result tree fragment is treated equivalently to a node-set that
   contains just a single root node.

EXSLT [2] says:

   The exsl:node-set function returns a node-set from a result tree
   fragment (which is what you get when you use the content of
   xsl:variable rather than its select attribute to give a variable
   value).

XPath 1.0 [3] says:

   XPath operates on an XML document as a tree.

and [4]:

   The root node is the root of the tree.

> it's possible to create new nodes within it, rather than creating a set

RTF nodes are not node-set nodes.

You're not creating node-set datatype nodes until you use
exsl:node-set() to turn the RTF into a node-set (or you use xsl:copy-of
to copy the RTF to the result tree).

About all you can do with an RTF as an RTF is use its string value.

> of references to nodes in the original document when @select is used.
> Then exsl:node-set() essentially acts like document(), correct? I think
> I was getting confused because I started out making copies of the nodes
> in the template content.

The result of exsl:node-set() has the same general structure as a
document in that it has one root node, but that root node could have
multiple element node children (unlike an XML document).

Regards,


Tony Graham.
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[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#section-Result-Tree-Fragments
[2] http://www.exslt.org/exsl/functions/node-set/index.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#data-model
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#root-node