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Hello all,
I'm having a hard time understanding when and why I should use value-of or apply-templates. Assuming a simple XML document: <root_element>
<head>
Name of website
</head>
<content>
<headline>
Interesting headline
</headline>
<body>
Even more interesting body.
</body>
</content>
<footer>
Copyright not reserved. Use as you please!
</footer>
</root_element>I've written two XSL scripts to handle the above. The first one looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="xml" encoding="ISO-8859-1" omit-xml-declaration="yes" doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"/> <xsl:template match="root_element"> <html> <head> <title> <xsl:value-of select="head"/> </title> </head> <body> <xsl:apply-templates select="content"/> <xsl:apply-templates select="footer"/> </body> </html> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="content">
<h4>
<xsl:apply-templates select="headline"/>
</h4>
<p>
<xsl:apply-templates select="body"/>
</p>
</xsl:template><xsl:template match="content/headline"> <xsl:apply-templates/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="content/body"> <xsl:apply-templates/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="footer"> <hr /> <p style="font-size: 11px;"> <xsl:apply-templates/> </p> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> And the second looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="xml" encoding="ISO-8859-1" omit-xml-declaration="yes" doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"/> <xsl:template match="root_element"> <html> <head> <title> <xsl:value-of select="head"/> </title> </head> <body> <h4> <xsl:value-of select="content/headline"/> </h4> <p> <xsl:value-of select="content/body"/> </p> <hr /> <p style="font-size: 11px;"> <xsl:value-of select="footer"/> </p> </body> </html> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> It's obvious that the second one is much shorter and perhaps also a bit more "readable", but is it the right way? Is there even a right way? I feel somewhat lost here. I'm sure there are strengths and weaknesses to both methods - I just can't put my finger on exactly what is good and bad. I'm looking for a bit of enlightment on the XSL way of doing things. Hope someone can help. Sincerely, Thomas
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