Choosing Output Methods

Another important aspect of writing stylesheets is picking the output method: XML, HTML, text (that is, any kind of text-based document that is not XML or HTML), and so on. In other words, the output method determines the type of document you’re creating. By default, the output method is XML, although most processors create HTML documents if they see a <HTML> element. (Some processors also do this if the extension of the document file you’re creating is .html.)

Chapter 6 discusses how this works in depth, but I’ll look at this topic in overview now. Unless you are sure that the default output type rules of your XSLT processor are doing what they should, it’s often advisable to set the output type explicitly to match the ...

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