Real World XML

Chapter 13. XSL Transformations

In this chapter, I'm going to start working with Extensible Stylesheet Language, (XSL). XSL has two parts, a transformation language and a formatting language.

The transformation language lets you transform the structure of documents into different forms (such as PDF, WML, HTML, or another schema type), while the formatting language actually formats and styles documents in various ways. These two parts of XSL can function quite independently, and you can think of XSL as two languages, not one. In practice, you often transform a document before formatting it because the transformation process lets you add the tags that the formatting process requires. In fact, this is one of the main reasons the World Wide Web Consortium ...