Difference between: child::node() and child::*

Question

I just wrote an XSLT that did not work at first.

I had to rename all children of to :

Answer 1

To expand on lwburk's answer, if your XML looks like this:

Then the A element has 7 child nodes; three of them are elements, four are text nodes. The expression child::node() matches all 7, whereas child::* only matches the elements.