Transformations
Another facility available to the XML programmer is document transformation. The Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) language, covered in Chapter 8, is the most popular tool currently available for transforming XML to HTML, XML, or any other regular language that can be expressed in XSLT. In some cases, using a transformation to perform pre- or post-processing on XML data can reduce the complexity of a DOM or SAX application. For instance, XSLT could be used as a preprocessor for a screen-scraping application that starts from XHTML documents. The complex XHTML document could be transformed into a smaller, more accessible application-specific XML format that could then be read by a script.
Transformations may be used by themselves, in browsers, or at the command line, but many XSLT implementations and other transformation tools offer SAX or DOM interfaces, simplifying the task of using them to build document processing pipelines.
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