XSLT for Dummies

In This Chapter

Sports fans are a fickle sort . When their team is winning, the coach is a genius, the team leader is a superman , and the players are the toast of the town. But when the local team starts to lose, suddenly these one-time heroes become the focus of scorn and contempt, especially on those radio call-in shows. When it comes to their favorite team, fans want results.

In the same way, people like you and me come to XSLT for one thing: results. More than most other languages, XSLT is a highly focused, goal-oriented language. You dont use it to create games or expansive systems; you use it because you have XML and need to transform it into something else, perhaps another XML format, HTML, text, or whatever.

After you discover many of the basics of XSLT, its time to get down to business. This chapter does just that by providing practical examples that show you how to perform the most common types of transformations using XSLT.