XSL : EXtensible Stylesheet Language, a language for specifying style sheets for XML documents..
XSL Transformation (XSLT) is used with XSL to describe how an XML document is transformed into another document.
Similar
to CSS, it defines the specification for an XML document's presentation
and appearance. Both CSS and XSL provide a platform-independent method
for specifying the document's presentation style.
With the XSL you can freely do modify any of the source text. Stylesheet 1 and the
Stylesheet 2 produces the different output from a same source file.
XSL stylesheet 1
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform' >
<xsl:template match="/">
<H1><xsl:value-of select="//title"/></H1>
<H2><xsl:value-of select="//author"/></H2>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
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XSL stylesheet 2
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform' >
<xsl:template match="/">
<H2><xsl:value-of select="//author"/></H2>
<H1><xsl:value-of select="//title"/></H1>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
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An XML Syntax
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An every XSL stylesheet should start with the xsl:stylesheet element. Atribute xmlns:xsl
specifies the version of the XSL(T) specification. This example do show simplest possible
stylesheet. As it do not contains any of the information, a default processing is been used.
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<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform' >
</xsl:stylesheet>
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An XSL Processor
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The XSL processors parses the XML source and tries to find out the matching template rule.
If it do find it, then the instructions inside the matching template are been evaluated.
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Contents of the original elements can be recovered from a original sources in two basic
ways. A Stylesheet 1 uses the xsl:value-of a construct. In this case contents of the
element is been used without any further processing. Construct an xsl:apply-templates in
the Stylesheet 2 is different. The parser further processes the selected elements, for
which the template is been defined..
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XSL stylesheet 1
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'>
<xsl:template match="employee">
<B><xsl:value-of select="."/></B>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="surname">
<i><xsl:value-of select="."/></i>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
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XSL stylesheet 2
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform' >
<xsl:template match="employee">
<B><xsl:apply-templates select="firstName"/></B>
<B><xsl:apply-templates select="surname"/></B>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="surname">
<i> <xsl:value-of select="."/></i>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet> | |
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