XML in Office 2003: Information Sharing with Desktop XML

Chapter 18. XSL Transformations (XSLT) Friendly Tutorial

• Template rules

• Patterns

• Templates

• Referencing stylesheets

We have seen XSLT used at a high level in other chapters, now we’ll look at the details of how it works. But be aware that the full details on XSLT could fill a book^[1] and we don’t cover them all here. The objective of this chapter is to provide a basic understanding for the way that XSLT stylesheets cause XML documents to be processed.

Transforming vs. rendering

XSL was designed to apply style to an XML document by using XSLT to transform it into a rendition, represented by XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO). The XSL processor may then display the rendered document on a screen, print it, or convert it to some other rendition representation, ...