XSLT, 2nd Edition

Parsing the Stylesheet

Before the XSLT processor can process your stylesheet, it has to read it. Conceptually, it doesn’t matter how the XSLT processor stores the information from your stylesheet. For our purposes, we’ll just assume that the XSLT processor can magically find anything it needs in our stylesheet. (If you really must know, Xalan uses an optimized table structure to represent the stylesheet; other processors may use that approach or something else.)

Our stylesheet contains three items: an <xsl:output> element that specifies HTML as the output format, and two <xsl:template> elements that specify how parts of our XML document should be transformed.