XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

An Example Input Document

To demonstrate XSL Transformations, we first need a document to transform. Example 8-1 shows the document used in this chapter. The root element is people, which contains two person elements. The person elements have roughly the same structure (a name followed by professions and hobbies) with some differences. For instance, Alan Turing has three professions, but Richard Feynman only has one. Feynman has a middle_initial and a hobby, but Turing doesn’t. Still, these are clearly variations on the same basic structure. A DTD that permitted both of these would be easy to write.

Example 8-1. An XML document describing two people

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<people>
  <person born="1912" died="1954">
    <name>
      <first_name>Alan</first_name>
      <last_name>Turing</last_name>
    </name>
    <profession>computer scientist</profession>
    <profession>mathematician</profession>
    <profession>cryptographer</profession>
  </person>
  <person born="1918" died="1988">
    <name>
      <first_name>Richard</first_name>
      <middle_initial>P</middle_initial>
      <last_name>Feynman</last_name>
    </name>
    <profession>physicist</profession>
    <hobby>Playing the bongoes</hobby>
  </person>
</people>

Example 8-1 is an XML document. For purposes of this example, it will be stored in a file called people.xml. It doesn’t have a DTD; however, this is tangential. XSLT works equally well with valid and invalid (but well-formed) documents. This document doesn’t use namespaces either, although it could. XSLT works just fine with namespaces. ...