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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T06:48:20+00:00

Why doesn’t this line: apply-templates select=*/* (under the shop element in the XSLT file)

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Why doesn’t this line:

apply-templates select="*/* (under the “shop” element in the XSLT file)

apply bold formatting to Blake2? The output looks like this:

Start of root in XSLT

“Step 1 start” Alexis (Task: Sales )
Employee2 (Task: ) Blake2 “Step 1 done”

End of root in XSLT

My question is, why isn’t Blake2 also in bold? It’s under the <employee> element.

Changing that line to *apply-templates select="*" causes Blake2 to be in bold. What makes this different?

Here’s the XML file:

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="2.xsl" ?>

<root>
    <shop>
        <person> 
            <employee> 
                <name> Alexis </name> 
                <role> Manager </role> 
                <task> Sales </task> 
            </employee> 

            <employee>
                <name> Employee2 </name>
            </employee>
        </person>

        <employee>
            <name> Blake2 </name>
        </employee>

    </shop>

</root>

Here’s the XSLT file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="root"> 
<html><head></head> 
<body>
Start of root in XSLT <p/> <xsl:apply-templates /> <p/>

End of root in XSLT

</body> 
</html> 
</xsl:template> 

<xsl:template match="shop">
"Step 1 start"
<xsl:apply-templates select="*/*"/>
"Step 1 done" <p/>
</xsl:template> 

<xsl:template match="employee"> 
<b> <xsl:apply-templates select="name"/> </b> 
(Task: <xsl:apply-templates select="task"/>) 
<br></br> 
</xsl:template> 

</xsl:stylesheet>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Your third template does not select any <employee> elements in your document. It just selects <employee> elements that are direct child nodes of the current element. On the root level, this does not apply to any elements, but as the second template is invoked by the <apply-templates> in the first element, and the second template applies templates with the (relative!) path */* (i.e. templates for any elements that are children of the children of the current element), the <employee> element in the <person> element gets selected.

    The second <employee> element is not a child of a child of the <shop> element, but a direct child of the <shop> element, and hence doesn’t get selected by */* starting at <shop>.

    When you change */* to *, both <employee> elements get selected: The second one gets selected because it directly matches * (a direct child of <shop>). * also selects <person>, and as there is no template specified for that element, the default behavior will be executed, meaning that templates will be applied to the children of <person>, which includes the first <employee> element.

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