Inside XSLT

Creating a Template

In Chapter 2, I created a basic template to match the nodes in planets.xml and convert that document to HTML. You create templates with <xsl:template> elements in your stylesheets, which specify the rules for the transformations you want to apply. We created a template that matched the <PLANETS> root element by matching the pattern “/PLANETS”, which stands for all <PLANETS> elements that are children of the root node, as follows:

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> 

    <xsl:template match="/PLANETS"> 
        . 
        . 
        . 
    </xsl:template> 
        . 
        . 
        . 
</xsl:stylesheet> 

When the XSLT processor finds a node that matches your template’s pattern, that node becomes the context node for the ...