XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Stylesheet Processors

An XSLT processor is a piece of software that reads an XSLT stylesheet, reads an XML document, and builds an output document by applying the instructions in the stylesheet to the information in the input document. An XSLT processor can be built into a web browser, just as MSXML is in Internet Explorer 6. It can be built into a web or application server, as in the Apache XML Project’s Cocoon (http://xml.apache.org/cocoon). Or it can be a standalone program run from the command line like Michael Kay’s SAXON (http://saxon.sourceforge.net) or the Apache XML Project’s Xalan (http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j).

Tip

Internet Explorer 5.0 and 5.5 partially support a very old and out-of-date working draft of XSLT, as well as various Microsoft extensions to this old working draft. They do not support XSLT 1.0, and indeed no XSLT stylesheets in this book work in IE5. Stylesheets that are meant for Microsoft XSLT can be identified by their use of the http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl namespace. IE6 supports both http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform and http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl. Good XSLT developers don’t use http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl and don’t associate with developers who do.