I was reading through W3C's specification of XSLT and noticed an interesting default behavior (built-in templates rules, section 5.

:
Code: Select all
<xsl:template match="*|/">
<xsl:apply-template />
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="text()|@*">
<xsl:value-of select="." />
</xsl:template>
<!-- plus others, but these are the biggies -->
This led me to wonder, "Perhaps it would be a better if these rules were disable these templates." While it means that a blank XSLT stylesheet transform equals a blank output, it also means that any node that doesn't have a template assigned to it will get dropped rather than shuffled through, forcing the stylesheet author to handle
everything.
In short, it tightens the coupling between the XML and XSLT (not that it wasn't tight already).
Is that a good idea?