September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
712 pages
24h 45m
English
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The Root Location Path
The simplest location path is the one that selects the root node of
the document. This is simply the forward slash /. (You’ll notice that a lot of XPath
syntax is deliberately similar to the syntax used by the Unix shell.
Here / is the root node of a Unix
filesystem, and / is the root
node of an XML document.) For example, this XSLT template rule uses
the XPath pattern / to match the
entire input document tree and wrap it in an html element:
<xsl:template match="/"> <html><xsl:apply-templates/></html> </xsl:template>
/ is an absolute location path because no matter what the
context node is—that is, no matter where the processor was in the
input document when this template rule was applied—it always means
the same thing: the root node of the document. It is relative to
which document you’re processing, but not to anything within that
document.