Well, I'm reasonably sure you will get more informed responses, 
but I can answer some of your questions:

Andre Halama wrote:
> 
> hi all,
> 
> these are probably faqs, but i *have to* understand this...
> 
> 0. what is the difference between 'child' and 'descendant'? is it right to
> presume that a child-node is the first node that stems from some parent
> node while 'descendants' denote all the nodes that stem from some parent?

* Think of this like your family tree, you are a child of your 
  father, but your children are his descendants. So with a 
  structure like this: 

  <chapter>
  <title>Some title here</title>
  <para>Some paragraph stuff with <emphasis>an
emphasis</emphasis>.
  </para>
  </chapter>

  <title> and <para> are children of <chapter>, but <emphasis> is
  a descendant, because it is a child of <para>. Note that here
is no limit
  to the level of nesting for descendants -- only for children.

> 
> 1. what is the content of an element node? the spec says that 'The *value*
> of an element node is the string that results from concatenating all
> characters that are descendants of the element node in the order in which
> they occur in the document.' so, if 'The children of an element node are
> the element nodes, comment nodes, processing instruction nodes and text
> nodes for its content.' what is meant by 'content' then? is there a
> hierarchical or coordinating relationship between them or are they merely
> associated nodes?

* The content is the text (roughly) with all tags removed. I'm
not 
  sure about comment or pi nodes (haven't had to look at this
yet), 
  but I believe that they are also stripped out unless you
explicitly
  copy them into the output.

  Given my previous example, the content of <para> is: 

  Some paragraph stuff with an emphasis.
> 
> 2. am i right in assuming that 'attribute nodes' and 'namespace nodes' are
> just associated with element nodes but don't have any *relationship* with
> them?

* I will let someone more knowledgeable answer this one (and
personally
  I'm somewhat unclear on this also).

> 
> this must sound *dumb as hell*, but i have to give a presentation on xsl
> and would like to get (at least) these basic things straight...
> 
> a.
> 
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list