Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

Introducing XPath

To perform formatting or transformations on an XML document, you must have some mechanism for locating the elements and attributes you want to either transform or apply formatting data to. That is where XPath comes in. XPath is a Recommendation from the W3C that deals specifically with locating elements and attributes within an XML document. There is an entire syntax and structure associated with XPath that is quite flexible and powerful—so powerful, in fact, that we have given it a separate chapter, and we will be covering XPath in much greater detail in Chapter 11, “Locating Components in XML Documents with XPath.”

However, to effectively talk about using XSLT and XSL-FO in the next few chapters, it is necessary to discuss ...