Chapter 2. XSLT Stylesheets

Well,we've discussed Xml, Dtds, Schema, Validity, well- formedness , and more in Chapter 1. Now we'll talk about XSLT. Where does XSLT fit into the picture? Let me answer that by relating another question posed to me by a couple of my co-workers who are just starting to work with XML. That question was roughly , "John, what exactly can these tags and delimiters that surround the extracted database data do for us? The XML spec doesn't cover much. What if we need this data in a different format than what the database or parser provides to us?"

This chapter will attempt to answer these questions by covering the following topics:

• The Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) and why it is needed

• The difference between cascading stylesheets (CSS) and XSLT

• Document tree navigation through an ancestry style of naming elements and structure

• The many elements that make up XSLT

• How to create and modify elements and attributes

• Output formatting, conditional processing, and looping

• The different types of output possible with XSLT

• Some heavyweight examples