Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

Areas

Processing a stylesheet involves breaking down the whole document into increasingly smaller pieces, and then applying formatting information to each of those pieces. For example, if we wanted to format a book, we would have a number of different pieces that made up the book: a cover, a title page, and chapters. Each chapter, in turn, would consist of paragraphs, made up of sentences, composed of characters.

XSL stylesheets work in a similar fashion, only abstracted to allow for a variety of document types. The highest level in XSL are regions. Regions, in turn, are broken down into block areas, which consist of line areas and inline areas.

Regions

Regions are large rectangular areas at the top of the object hierarchy. For example, a page ...