XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. XSL Transformations (XSLT)

The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is divided into two parts: XSL Transformations (XSLT) and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). This chapter describes XSLT. Chapter 14 covers XSL-FO.

XSLT is an XML application for specifying rules by which one XML document is transformed into another XML document. An XSLT document—that is, an XSLT stylesheet—contains template rules. Each template rule has a pattern and a template. An XSLT processor compares the elements and other nodes in an input XML document to the template-rule patterns in a stylesheet. When one matches, it writes the template from that rule into the output tree. When it’s done, it may further serialize the output tree into an XML document or some other format like plain text or HTML.

This chapter describes the template rules and a few other elements that appear in an XSLT stylesheet. XSLT uses the XPath syntax to identify matching nodes. We’ll introduce a few pieces of XPath here, but most of it will be covered in Chapter 9.