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Re: sort by attribute text


Mike,

At 04:21 PM 3/26/2002, you wrote:
>Nice to know it was not my syntax. I guess I need to take another
>look at the book.

Nope, it's not. It's the same thing as before, understanding how XPath 
expressions work, particularly in relation to the context node.

select="*" gets you a different set of nodes depending on what the context 
is for the expression. This is a technical way of explaining why it usually 
matters what your template has matched on.

At some point all this stuff should click. XPath is really quite simple 
once you've assimilated a few basic, but non-obvious facts. According to 
the spec (XPath 1), any expression is evaluated in a context, which includes:

* a node (the context node)
* a pair of integers:
   1. the context size
      i.e. how many nodes were selected with this one
      is returned by the last() function
   2. the context position
      i.e. which node is this one among the ones it was selected with
      is returned by the position() function
* variable bindings in scope
* available function library (XPath, XSLT, extension functions, etc.)
* namespaces in scope

In order to evaluate any arbitrary expression, the processor needs to know 
what all these are. In order to understand how your own XPath expressions 
work, it's helpful for you to know what they are, too. They're not hard to 
figure out: the context node, size and position are determined by the 
selection of nodes in your apply-templates or for-each instructions (or, in 
predicates, by the steps in your location paths). The others are either 
predefined, or directly under your control, or (in the case of namespaces 
in the source) static with respect to the source document.

But many beginners have not assimilated that even the first one, the 
context node, matters -- and it's often downhill from there.

Cheers,
Wendell


======================================================================
Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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