Special Edition Using XSLT

Templates and Template Rules

Templates are the individual statements you’ll use to create a transformation. A collection of templates are grouped together into what’s called a template rule. Listing 2.2 contains just one template rule. This begins with

<xsl:template match="/"> 

and ends with the closing tag

</xsl:template> 

This template rule is called the root template rule, because it processes the root element of the source document (see Listing 2.1). All style sheets must contain a root template rule. Later, you’ll learn how you can add other template rules to process additional elements from the source document.

Template rules contain a match attribute that specifies which element or elements you are processing. The root template rule’s ...