I agree, this is something that 'ought' to appear as a 
design pattern -- perhaps with some demonstrations to 
back it up. I've talked DTD design principles with 
several programmers who come from a data-background or 
are familiar with HTML (which does very little of this)
and they are very suspicious (or incredulous) of the
idea of adding wrapper elements. (In some cases, I 
literally think they didn't respond because their
initial reaction seemed impolite!)

It goes against the grain of their experience, but it 
can literally be a huge improvement both in simplifying 
the stylesheet and sometimes in improving response time 
(this one is _really_ counter-intuitive). 

Sara

>DaveP wrote: (snipped)
> 
> Often one additional wrapper in the source XML makes all the 
> difference in the world to the ease of processing via XSLT.
>  To be able to sit (sorry, template match) on the wrapper, and play
> with the children (??) of that wrapper is a piece of cake compared
> to matching on one of many, and chasing along the axis to do 
> something.
> 
> There's a design pattern here... somewhere.
> 
> DaveP
>  
> 
> 
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
> 


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