Hello, World! (XSLT)

The following example shows a simple but complete XML document transformed by an XSLT style sheet. The source XML document, hello.xml, contains a "Hello, World!" greeting from "An XSLT Programmer".

XML (hello.xml)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="hello.xsl"?>
<hello-world>
   <greeter>An XSLT Programmer</greeter>
   <greeting>Hello, World!</greeting>
</hello-world>

The source document contains the <?xml-stylesheet …?> processing instruction to link it to the XSLT style sheet, hello.xsl. The XSLT file contains instructions for transforming the source document into an HTML document.

XSLT (hello.xsl)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet 
      xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
      version="1.0">
   <xsl:template match="/hello-world">
       <HTML>
         <HEAD>
           <TITLE></TITLE>
         </HEAD>
         <BODY>
            <H1><xsl:value-of select="greeting"/></H1>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="greeter"/>
         </BODY>
       </HTML>
   </xsl:template>
   <xsl:template match="greeter">
       <DIV>from 
           <I><xsl:value-of select="."/></I>
       </DIV>
   </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

To test the sample, copy the XML and XSLT code, and paste each into a file. Save the files on your machine as hello.xml and hello.xsl, respectively. Open hello.xml from Internet Explorer.

The effect of the transformation is to display the "Hello, World!" message on a Web page, followed by the signature of the greeter. This XSLT style sheet illustrates the basic features required of every XSLT style sheet:

An XSLT style sheet typically starts with the <?xml version="1.0"?> processing instruction, declaring it as an XML file.
The root element is <xsl:stylesheet>. The version attribute specifies the version of the XSLT specification. The xmlns:xsl attribute allows you to define a namespace alias (xsl) for use with every XSLT element in the document (e.g., <xsl:value-of> instead of simply <value-of>).
The content of this root element consists of a set of template rules declared within the <xsl:template> elements. These rules specify how various elements in the source XML document are to be transformed into result elements.

The example above contains two simple template-rules. Together, they transform the contents in the source XML document into an HTML page. More complex XSLT style sheets contain either more template rules or template rules that are more complex.