XML Unleashed

Inside XSL Style Sheets

Although XSL style sheets are very powerful and can be somewhat complex when you're styling complex XML documents, their basic structure is very straightforward. An XSL style sheet consists of one or more templates that describe patterns, which are used to match XML content for styling purposes. The two fundamental constructs in an XSL style sheet are

• Templates

• Patterns

Note

Keep in mind that this discussion of XSL style sheets focuses primarily on XSLT, so naturally the emphasis will be on transforming XML documents using style sheets, as opposed to formatting them with XSL Formatting Objects. Although XSL Formatting Objects aren't covered in this discussion, XML documents are nonetheless formatted using XSL. However, ...