XSLT for Dummies

In This Chapter

A s a sports fan, I enjoy watching all kinds of team sports, whether football, basketball , baseball, or an Olympic team competition. Ive noticed that regardless of the sport, great teams have two things in common. First, they have very talented individuals on them. Second, they function well as a team; I find hardly anything more thrilling in sports than seeing a squad of talented athletes working together cohesively. (Of course, it goes without saying that the most exciting part of sports is the Im going to Disneyworld commercials!)

Although this book focuses on eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, or XSLT, youll quickly discover that XSLT is an important component of a closely related set of technologies that I affectionately call the X-Team. This Dream X-Team consists of: XML, XSL, XSLT, and XPath. (For the techies out there, thats shorthand for eXtensible Markup Language, eXtensible Stylesheet Language, XSL Transformations, and XML Path Language.) Each of these technologies is powerful, but each gets its true strength through interrelationships. So, although I concentrate much of the attention in this book on XSLT, never think of it as something independent of its teammates.

As you start your XSLT journey, I begin by introducing you to the X-Team members , each of which has a separate but intertwined responsibility.