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XSLT Tutorial

XSLT is rule-based

This tutorial will demonstrate the programming features of XSLT. XSLT is different from conventional programming languages because XSLT is based on template rules which specify how XML documents should be processed. Although conventional programming languages are often sequential, template rules can be based in any order because XSLT is a declarative language. The stylesheet declares what output should be produced when a pattern in the XML document is matched.

For example, a stylesheet could declare that when the XSLT transformation engine finds a 'NAME' element it should add markup by calling the 'NAME' template.

The template syntax is:

<xsl:template match="NAME">
    ...
</xsl:template>

XSLT - a simple example

Lets examine a simple example of using XSL to transform an XML document into an HTML table.

Open Worksheet 1 - Simple XSLT table example

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