Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

By Steven Holzner

• Table of Contents
  • About the Author
  • Acknowledgments
  • We Want to Hear from You!
  • Introduction
  • Part I: At a Glance
  • Day 1. Welcome to XML
  • Day 2. Creating XML Documents
  • Day 3. Creating Well-Formed XML Documents
  • Day 4. Creating Valid XML Documents: DTDs
  • Declaring Attributes in DTDs
  • Day 6. Creating Valid XML Documents: XML Schemas
  • Day 7. Creating Types in XML Schemas
  • Part I. In Review
  • Day 8. Formatting XML by Using Cascading Style Sheets
  • Day 9. Formatting XML by Using XSLT
    • Introducing XSLT
    • Transforming XML by Using XSLT
    • Writing XSLT Style Sheets
    • Using <xsl:apply-templates>
    • Using <xsl:value-of> and <xsl:for-each>
    • Matching Nodes by Using the match Attribute
    • Working with the select Attribute and XPath
    • Using <xsl:copy>
    • Using <xsl:if>
    • Using <xsl:choose>
    • Specifying the Output Document Type
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Workshop
  • Day 10. Working with XSL Formatting Objects
  • Part II. In Review
  • Part III: At a Glance
  • Day 11. Extending HTML with XHTML
  • Day 12. Putting XHTML to Work
  • Day 13. Creating Graphics and Multimedia: SVG and SMIL
  • Day 14. Handling XLinks, XPointers, and XForms
  • Part III. In Review
  • Part IV: At a Glance
  • Day 15. Using JavaScript and XML
  • Day 16. Using Java and .NET: DOM
  • Day 17. Using Java and .NET: SAX
  • Day 18. Working with SOAP and RDF
  • Part IV. In Review
  • Part V: At a Glance
  • Day 19. Handling XML Data Binding
  • Day 20. Working with XML and Databases
  • Day 21. Handling XML in .NET
  • Part V. In Review
  • Appendix A. Quiz Answers

Day 9. Formatting XML by Using XSLT

Yesterday you saw that you can use CSS to format XML documents in the major browsers (Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator). However, there's a native XML way to format XML documents for display—using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), which is what you'll discuss today. Here's an overview of today's topics:

• Transforming XML in the server, in the client, and with standalone programs
• Creating an XSLT style sheet
• Creating and applying templates
• Getting node values
• Handling multiple selections
• Using the match and select attributes
• Matching element, processing instructions, and other nodes
• Working with XPath
• Creating XPath node tests
• Copying nodes to the output document
• Making decisions in XSLT based on input data

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