XSLT and XPATH: A Guide to XML Transformations

2.3. XSLT Stylesheet Terminology

It is often possible to do a great deal of work with a given technology without ever knowing exactly what some of its terms mean. Although XSLT is basically XML, there are very specific uses for its elements and attributes. The basic concepts of stylesheet structure go beyond the basic XML tagging structure to form a logical “programming” application. It is especially important, then, that we detail the terminology of XSLT.

2.3.1. Stylesheet

The term stylesheet is for the most part self-explanatory, but in the context of XSLT, it requires a certain qualification. Literally, an XSLT stylesheet is an XML document instance that is processed by an XSLT engine to perform a transformation on other XML documents. A stylesheet ...