XML Unleashed

Processing an XSL Style Sheet

To fully understand XSL, you must have a solid grasp of how an XSL processor processes XML documents. Two things are required before an XSL processor can process a document: the XML tree representation of the document and the XSL style sheet. The XML tree representation of a document is obtained by parsing the document, which means that the XSL processor must be coupled with an XML parser in order to function. This also means that it isn't the job of the XML processor to parse XML documents. Assuming that a document is successfully parsed into a tree, the XSL processor can begin its work.

The XSL processor starts with the root node in the tree, using it to perform pattern matching in the style sheet. An XSL style ...