XSLT

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 ancestor axis, 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 ...