Understanding the XSLT Process

The following is a summary of the XSLT process.

1. An XML file and an XSLT style sheet are read and parsed into the source and style sheet trees, respectively.
2. The template rules declared in the XSLT style sheet are applied to each matching XML element in the source tree. The application of the template rules produces a result tree.
3. The result tree is serialized, often as a character stream.

The following illustration presents a visual introduction to the various steps of the XSLT process. It shows the various input files and output destinations for an XSLT transformation. The most common transformation produces HTML output from an XML data source. Click on a colored area of this illustration to find out more about that component of the XSLT transformation.