XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Benja Fallenstein <b.fallenstein AT gmx.de>]

Dear Elliotte,

(Maybe this came up in the past but a cursory search of the archives 
didn't turn up discussion of this.)

First of all, thanks for your work on XOM. (I've just recently used it 
for the first time, and finally, there's a tree-based XML API I can 
understand ;-))

I've been using XSLTransform to transform a document into another 
document. However, the result type of XSLTransform.transform() is Nodes. 
This makes sense as applying an XSLT stylesheet may produce a node set 
with more than one "root element."

However, if I know that the result I want is a document, is there some 
easy way to create a Document object? So far I'm assuming that the Nodes 
contains a single Element, which I use as the root of a Document, but 
this seems flawed since besides the Element there may be processing 
instructions etc.

Am I missing something?

I've thought about this, and if I'm not in fact missing something, what 
to me seems to be the "natural" way of doing this is to have a 
constructor for Document that takes a Nodes object, and, obviously, 
throws an error if there is more than one Element in it. Then I could write

    doc = new Document(stylesheet.transform(doc));

and catch the appropriate error to handle cases where the result is in 
fact not a document.

Of course I *could* myself write some code that converts the Nodes to a 
Document properly, it just seems so counter-intuitive and the wrong 
place to do it. But perhaps that's just me?

Thanks,
- Benja