Attribute Location Steps

Attributes are also addressable by XPath. To select a particular attribute of an element, use an @ sign followed by the name of the attribute you want. For example, the XPath expression @born selects the born attribute of the context node. Example 9-3 is a simple XSLT stylesheet that generates an HTML table of names and birth and death dates from documents like Example 9-1.

Example 9-3. An XSLT stylesheet that uses root element, child element, and attribute location steps
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
     
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <html>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="people"/>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>
     
  <xsl:template match="people">
    <table>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="person"/>
    </table>
  </xsl:template>
     
  <xsl:template match="person">
    <tr>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="name"/></td>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="@born"/></td>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="@died"/></td>
    </tr>
  </xsl:template>
     
</xsl:stylesheet>

The stylesheet in Example 9-3 has three template rules. The first template rule has a match pattern that matches the root node, /. The XSLT processor activates this template rule and sets the context node to the root node. Then it outputs the start-tag <html>. This is followed by an xsl:apply-templates element that selects nodes matching the XPath expression people. If the input document is Example 9-1, then there is exactly one such node, the root element. This is selected and its template rule, the one ...

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