A Rule-Based Stylesheet

All XSLT processing is rule-based, it’s just that some stylesheets take advantage of this fact more than others. Our first stylesheet (Example B-2) only used one template rule (where match="/“). Now we’ll look at a stylesheet that uses multiple template rules.

Example B-4 shows the source document for this example transformation. It is a simple article that contains a heading and multiple paragraphs. Inside the paragraphs, there is some “mixed content,” i.e., elements that contain both text and elements (e.g., the emphasis element).

Example B-4. A simple XML document containing marked-up text

<article>
  <heading>This is a short article</heading>
  <para>This is the <emphasis>first</emphasis> paragraph.</para>
  <para>This is the <strong>second</strong> paragraph.</para>
</article>

Example B-5 shows a simple XSLT stylesheet that is designed to process documents that look like the XML document in Example B-4.

Example B-5. An XSLT stylesheet with multiple template rules

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <html> <head> <title> <xsl:value-of select="/article/heading"/> </title> </head> <body> <h1> <xsl:value-of select="/article/heading"/> </h1> <xsl:apply-templates select="/article/para"/> </body> </html> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="para"> <p> <xsl:apply-templates/> </p> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="emphasis"> <i> <xsl:apply-templates/> </i> </xsl:template> ...

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