Inside XSLT

Writing Attribute Values

There are several ways to write attribute values to output documents in XSLT, and the most powerful one is to create attributes from scratch with the <xsl:attribute> element you’ll see in Chapter 6. However, you can also use attribute value templates for many purposes, and I’ll take a look at them in this chapter.

For example, suppose that you want to convert the text in the elements such as <MASS>, <DAY>, and <NAME> to attributes of <PLANET> elements, converting planets.xml to this form:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <PLANETS> <PLANET DAY="58.65 days" RADIUS="1516 miles" MASS=".0553 (Earth = 1)" NAME="Mercury"/> <PLANET DAY="116.75 days" RADIUS="3716 miles" MASS=".815 (Earth = 1)" NAME="Venus"/> <PLANET DAY="1 ...