At first glance, you may naturally look at the following XML snippet and conclude that animals is the root node of this document tree:
<animals> <cats> <tigers/> <lions/> <tabby/> </cats> <dogs> <collie/> <doberman/> </dogs> </animals>
Although animals is the highest level element (known as the document element ), it is not the root node. The root node is a "built-in" node and automatically serves as the ancestor of all nodes in the document tree. You never actually see the root node show up in your documentits just there; a given. Therefore, in the preceding example, animals is a child of the root node.
To demonstrate , the following template rule uses / to retrieve the root node:
<xsl:template match="/"> <!-- Do something --> </xsl:template>
When run on the preceding XML snippet, the animals element is not returned, but the root above it in the tree hierarchy.
