Inside XSLT

XML Documents

It’s going to be important for you to know how XML documents work, so use this section to ensure that you’re up to speed. Here’s an example XML document that I’ll take a look at:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<DOCUMENT> 
    <GREETING> 
        Hello From XML 
    </GREETING> 
    <MESSAGE> 
        Welcome to the wild and woolly world of XML. 
    </MESSAGE> 
</DOCUMENT> 

Here’s how this document works: I start with the XML processing instruction <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> (all XML processing instructions start with <? and end with ?>), which indicates that I’m using XML version 1.0, the only version currently defined, and UTF-8 character encoding, which means that I’m using an eight-bit condensed version of Unicode:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> ...