12.1 Background

XSLT is a transformation language for XML documents
Originally designed for specifying how XML documents are to be formatted, but found to be more generally useful
XSLT stylesheets are XML documents
A declarative language in nature relying on template rules
A stylesheet consists of a set of template rules
Each template rule provides a pattern specifying where the template applies
The matching patterns are specified in terms of XPath.
XSLT is defined in the http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform namespace

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
   xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
>
  <xsl:template match="pattern-1" >
     template-1
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match="pattern-2" >
     template-2
  </xsl:template>
  ...........
</xsl:stylesheet>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
   xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
>
  <xsl:template match="@*|*|text()|processing-instruction()" >
     <xsl:apply-templates
           select="@*|*|text()|processing-instruction()" />
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

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