Why replace one attribute by element is valid, and two attributes not?

Question

In a identity transform we can delete an attribute by

this works for any input... And we can \"r

Answer 1

It's difficult to answer your questions because some of your assumptions are wrong. For example:

my new element

works for any number of elements. When applied (together with an identity transform template) to the following input:

the result will be:

   
      my new element
      
         my new element
      
   
   
      my new element
   

So clearly your assertion that "it works only when input have only one element" is not true.

With regard to:

newValue

This does not replace the value of myAttrib because the template matches the attribute - not its value (as an aside: the value of an attribute is not a node and cannot be matched). So just like before, the attribute is matched and another node is output in its place; first it was an element, now it's a text node. That's the only difference.

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Edit:

The "replace procedure" is one attribute-node per one element-node.

No, that's not true either. Consider, for example, the following input:

and the following template:

or:

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BTW, none of these examples will work with Saxon - but that's another story.