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Structure of a stylesheet

An XSLT stylesheet is itself an XML document:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"
                xmlns="...">
   .
   .
   .
  <xsl:template match="pattern">   \
    template                        > a template rule
  </xsl:template>                  /
   .
   .                  <- other top-level elements
   .
</xsl:stylesheet>

The namespace http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform is used to recognize the XSLT elements; elements from other namespaces constitute literal result fragments.

A document may refer to a stylesheet using the processing instruction:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="foo.xsl"?>

Newer browsers contain an XSLT processor.

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