Glossary
A
- absolute location path
A location path that begins with
/, followed by one or more location steps separated by/. All location paths that begin with/are evaluated from the root node, so they always return the same result, regardless of the context node. Compare with location path and relative location path.- ancestor
A node that appears above a given node. Ancestors include a node’s parent, its parent’s parent, its parent’s parent’s parent, etc. XPath also defines the
ancestoraxis, which includes a node’s parent, its parent’s parent, its parent’s parent’s parent, etc., but not the node itself. Contrast with parent.- attribute node
The XPath node type that represents an attribute from an XML document. Attributes are different from other nodes because an attribute node is not considered a child of the element node that contains it. Despite this fact, the element node is considered the parent of the attribute node.
- attribute set
A named group of attributes. You can create an attribute set (with the
<xsl:attribute-set>element), then reference that attribute set elsewhere. For more information, see the description of the<xsl:attribute-set>element in Appendix A.- attribute value template
An expression that contains an XPath expression in curly braces (
{}). The XPath expression is evaluated at runtime, and its value replaces the expression. For an example of an attribute value template, see the discussion of the<xsl:attribute>element in Appendix A; Chapter 3 contains ???a complete ...