Some background: This sub-thread was started by my co-worker.  We were
puzzling over the attributes vs. sub-elements for fields issue.
We decided to use sub-elements because we could not individually style
attributes (since a template rule cannot match an attribute, only its
element).

>> you wanted to create choice box or list with all @name values. You
>> could match the pattern, but then could never revisit the element to get
>> information about its content or its other attribute values.
>
> why not?

> you can either process using different modes, or you
> just select in with different patterns, as often as you like.

Perhaps, we're wrong, but our understanding of the spec and our experience
with SAXON is that a particular source element can only be matched once
during the styling process.  Suppose the source document has:
<book title="All About Foo" author="Dr. Quux"/>
and I want to place the title in one part of the result tree and the author
in another.  To do so, I might have
<xsl:apply-templates select="book[@title]"/>
in one place, and
<xsl:apply-templates select="book[@author]"/>
in the other.  The problem is that both apply-templates "calls" match the
same
source element so only one of them gets generated.  In addition, the
template
rule triggered by these two apply-templates tags cannot distinguish which
apply-templates "call" triggered the rule, so it doesn't know which
attribute
to style (I'm guessing that this can be handled with a variable).

Am I missing or misunderstanding something?  Is it possible for the
processor
to apply more than one template rule for the same source element, e.g. if a
different mode is used for each apply-templates and correpsonding template
rule?
Would I then need a different mode for each attribute that I'm styling
separately?

:Caleb Drake, ThoughtWorks, LLC


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