XSLT, 2nd Edition

The <xsl:stylesheet> Element

The <xsl:stylesheet> element is typically the root element of an XSLT stylesheet:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

First of all, the <xsl:stylesheet> element defines the version of XSLT we’re using, along with a definition of the xsl namespace. To be compliant with the XSLT specification, your stylesheet should always begin with this element, coded exactly as shown here. Some stylesheet processors, notably Xalan, issue a warning message if your <xsl:stylesheet> element doesn’t have these two attributes with these two values. For all examples in this book, we’ll start the stylesheet with this exact element, defining other namespaces as needed.