Several people have asked me about the following XSLT transform, which I use to start every XML-to-XML stylesheet:
What does it do? Nothing useful like this. It just copies all the XML input to the output using recursion. (Think about axes when you look at those XPaths: attributes are not children.) The identity transform itself is from section 7.5 of the XSLT specification.
It’s useful when you add more templates that match nodes more specifically. It’s a great way to filter or edit large (ish) XML documents for little programming effort, especially over large numbers of documents when combined with some command-line scripting.
(And I just discovered the first things I don’t like about WordPress: escaping works badly, and you can’t upload XSLT in standard config…)
