14.1. Understanding Location Paths

Recursion is a powerful aspect of XSLT. It allows you to locate various structures according to their context in a document. Essentially, you work from the root context in a document to the top-level nodes, and then you explore successive levels of nodes associated with each top-level node until you’ve examined all the structures you want to work with in a document.

The / representing the root node is only one of the many XPath expressions you can use. Each expression follows a specific syntax and can make use of various operators to locate specific types of nodes. You can access nodes using location paths that are context-specific as well as by using paths that are context-free.