12.3 Processing the Source Tree

• The processing of a document is performed recursively on the underlying DOM tree, starting at the root.
• The processing of the children of a context node is automatically requested, if the node and all its ancestors do not match any template.
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>  
  <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"  
     xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"  
  >  
  </xsl:stylesheet>  
  

  <?xml version="1.0"         encoding="utf-8" ?>   <helloWorld>     <greeting>Hello World!</greeting>   </helloWorld>

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>       Hello World!

• The processing of a single node consists of
  • Finding the template rule matching the current node
  • Producing the output requested by the template
  • Invoking the processing of the nodes specified by the template
  
• Recursive activations of the children nodes may be requested with elements of the following form.
  <xsl:apply-templates />

• In the general case, requests of the following form may be used to explicitly specify the arbitrary nodes to be recursively activated.
  <xsl:apply-templates select="xpath" />