THE XML REVOLUTION - TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

Processing model

An XSLT stylesheet consists of a number of template rules:

template rule = pattern + template

template rule = pattern + template

For a given input XML document, the output is obtained as follows:

the source tree is processed by processing the root node
(implicitly, the root node of a document is a special document node which has the root element as its only child)
a single node is processed by:
1. finding the template rule with the best matching pattern
2. instantiating its template (creates result fragment + continues processing recursively)
a node list is processed by processing each node in order and concatenating the results

This cartoon illustrates the processing model.