Single-Template Stylesheets

Many useful transformations can be expressed with just a single-root template. We’ll examine the single-template stylesheet here, but we’ll spend the rest of this chapter learning why there’s a world beyond the root template and why it’s worth learning about.

All of the stylesheets we’ve seen so far for transforming XML into HTML either have looked like this:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> 
  <!-- The "root" or "main" template -->
  <xsl:template match="/"> 
    <html>
      <body>
        <!-- 
         | Literal result elements and attributes, intermingled with
         | <xsl:for-each>, <xsl:value-of>, attribute value templates, etc.
         +-->
     </body>
    </html>
  <xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

or have used the simple form of the single-root template stylesheet, which looks like this:

<!-- In the "simple form" of a stylesheet, the root template is implied -->
<html xsl:version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <body>
     <!-- 
      | Literal result elements and attributes, intermingled with
      | <xsl:for-each>, <xsl:value-of>, attribute value templates, etc.
      +-->
  </body>
</html>

Tip

When you see the xsl namespace declaration:

xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"

it is natural to think that the XSLT processor will try to access that URL when your stylesheet is processed. However, the declaration is only used as a unique string to identify the namespace for XSLT. If you do not provide this exact string as the namespace URI for the xsl ...

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