XSLT: <apply-templates select=“…”>

Question

I have a question regarding <xsl:apply-templates> .

Lets assume I have an XML like this (see http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-subst.html ):

<transcription>
<subst>    
    <del>wrong</del>
    <add>right</add>
</subst>    
</transcription>

Now I want to process this recording of a transcription in different ways using XSLT.

If I just want to present the correction to the user, I could use an XSLT template like this:

<xsl:template match="subst"><xsl:apply-templates select="./add"/></xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="subst/add"><xsl:apply-templates/></xsl:template>

However, I could also write:

<xsl:template match="subst"><xsl:apply-templates/></xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="subst/add"><xsl:apply-templates/></xsl:template>

<!-- del: ignore contents -->
<xsl:template match="subst/del"></xsl:template>

In the first case, I explicitly only address add inside <subst> , ignoring <del> .

In the second case, I ignore <del> by providing a template that does not do anything with the element, resulting in the same effect.

If I am not mistaken, the two ways are equivalent. Which one is preferable?

Answer 1

IMHO, not processing nodes at all is preferable to processing them with an empty template. But sometimes the alternative is more convenient, eg for reasons of code readability.