XML Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes

∟XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) Introduction

∟"Hello world!" Example of XSLT

This section provides a tutorial example on how to a first XSLT stylesheet, hello.xls, to transform the original XML document, hello.xml. The Internet Explorer (IE) can be used as XSLT transformation program to apply the stylesheet and generate the resulting document.

Here is the XSLT stylesheet file, hello.xsl, that defines how information in my hello.xml should be transformed:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
   xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:template match="p">Hello world! - From hello.xsl.</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Note that:

• The root element is named as "xsl:stylesheet".
• All the element names are prefixed with "xls:".
• Prefix "xls:" is associated with the XML name space: "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform". This is done by the attribute, "xmlns:xsl" in the root element.

In order to link hello.xsl to hello.xml, I have to modify it as hello_xsl.xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="hello.xsl"?>
<p>Hello world!</p>

Note that a new processing instruction "xml-stylesheet" is added to the XML file to tell the processing applications to look for style instructions in "hello.xsl".

The next question is then: "Do we have an application that can process this XML file based on the style instructions specified in the XSL file?"

The answer is yes. Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0 is an excellent XML XSL processor. So if you run IE 6.0 and open hello_xsl.xml, you will see the following text in the IE window:

Hello world! - From hello.xsl.

Note that:

• The element "p" in hello.xml was transformed into a new text string by IE.
• IE first transformed the content in hello_xsl.xml, kept the result in memory, then displayed the result on the screen.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Introduction of XML (eXtensible Markup Language)

 XML File Syntax

 XML File Browsers

 DOM (Document Object Model) Programming Interface

 SAX (Simple API for XML) Programming Interface

 DTD (Document Type Definition) Introduction

 Syntaxes of DTD Statements

 Validating an XML Document against the Specified DTD Document Type

 XSD (XML Schema Definition) Introduction

 Syntaxes of XSD Statements

 Validating an XML Document against the Specified XML Schema

►XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) Introduction

 What Is XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language)?

►"Hello world!" Example of XSLT

 XSLT (XSL Transformations) Introduction

 Java Implementation of XSLT

 XPath (XML Path) Language

 XSLT Elements as Programming Statements

 Control and Generate XML Element in the Result

 References

 Printable Copy - PDF Version