XSLT and XPATH: A Guide to XML Transformations

1.2. What Is XSLT?

In its most basic sense, XSLT is XML. The familiar structure of markup, using less-than and greater-than symbols (“<” and “>,” as seen, for instance, in <xsl:stylesheet>), makes its syntax readily identifiable.

There are several benefits to thinking of XSLT as an XML document instance. Of course, aside from the familiar tagging structure, it is important to have specifications that conform to the same syntax, are platform-independent, and can be parsed by the same basic technology.

Another benefit is the notion of well-formedness, which allows the structuring of XSLT stylesheets to proceed without a particular DTD.^[1] The importance of well-formedness for an XSLT stylesheet cannot be emphasized enough—both for the XSLT stylesheet ...