XML Chapter 4: A Basic XSL Stylesheet

A Basic XSL Stylesheet

Examine the following simple XML document, which contains a list of writers:

<?xml-stylesheet...?> tells the browser which stylesheet to use.
- Like HTML's LINK tag, e.g. <LINK href="mystyle.css" rel="style sheet" type="text/css">
- Defined in W3C's Associating Style Sheets with XML Documents.

mysheet.xsl generates a well-formed HTML document with a bullet list:

<xsl:stylesheet...> means:
- Use the XSL namespace, version 1.0. (Note: the 1999 indicates the year in which the URI was allocated by the W3C.)
<xsl:output...> means:
- Produce the result tree in HTML 4.0 format.
An XSL stylesheet is made up of "templates", defined by <xsl:template...> elements. They match nodes in the source tree and produce a result tree.
The <xsl:template match="/"> line matches against the root node in the source tree (the writers element). The <xsl:template match="author"> line matches the author element, and so on.
Within a template, all elements that are not in the XSL namespace (all elements that do not start with xsl:) are nodes to be created in the result tree. For legibility, we have capitalized all HTML output.
The <xsl:apply-templates> line tells the processor to process the templates for the all the nodes contained within the current node.
The <xsl:apply-templates select="last"> line tells the processor to process the template for the last element.
The default template (when no template is defined) simply outputs the text content of the element.
Here is how this would be rendered by a browser.