Inside XML

Chapter 13. XSL Transformations

In this chapter, I'm going to start working with the Extensible Styles Language (XSL). XSL has two parts—a transformation language and a formatting language.

The transformation language lets you transform documents into different forms, while the formatting language actually formats and styles documents in various ways. These two parts of XSL can function quite independently, and you can think of XSL as two languages, not one. In practice, you often transform a document before formatting it because the transformation process lets you add the tags the formatting process requires. In fact, that is one of the main reasons that W3C supports XSLT as the first stage in the formatting process, as we'll see in the next ...