> I am curious, why was this syntax invented in the XSLT 2.0
> spec? What are the use cases for this syntax?
It wasn't invented in 2.0, it was retained from 1.0. It has never been
widely used. The intended use case, I think, was the "fill-in-the-blanks"
stylesheet developed by taking an XHTML document as the starting point and
replacing various parts of it by XSLT/XPath expressions to compute the
content.
I use them sometimes for brevity, but I find that the very users for whom
they were intended, that is the users who only want to make very simple use
of XSLT, are the users who find them most unfamiliar and baffling.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
