Learning XML, 2nd Edition

Concepts

Before we jump into specifics, I want to explain some important concepts that will help you understand how XSLT works. An XSLT processor (I’ll call it an XSLT engine) takes two things as input: an XSLT stylesheet to govern the transformation process and an input document called the source tree. The output is called the result tree.

The XSLT stylesheet controls the transformation process. While it is usually called a stylesheet, it is not necessarily used to apply style. This is just a term inherited from the original intention of using XSLT to construct XSL-FO trees. Since XSLT is used for many other purposes, it may be better to call it an XSLT script or transformation document, but I will stick with the convention to avoid confusion.

The XSLT processor is a state engine. That is, at any point in time, it has a state, and there are rules to drive processing forward based on the state. The state consists of defined variables plus a set of context nodes, the nodes that are next in line for processing. The process is recursive, meaning that for each node processed, there may be children that also need processing. In that case, the current context node set is temporarily shelved until the recursion has completed.

The XSLT engine begins by reading in the XSLT stylesheet and caching it as a look-up table. For each node it processes, it will look in the table for the best matching rule to apply. The rule specifies what to output to build its part of the result tree, and ...