5.1. XSLT Basics

An XSLT stylesheet is made up of a single top-level xsl:stylesheet element that contains one or more xsl:template elements. These templates can contain literal elements that become part of the generated result, functional elements from the XSLT grammar that control such things as which parts of the source document to process, and often a combination of the two. The contents of the source XML document are accessed and evaluated from within the stylesheet's templates and other function elements using the XPath language. The following shows a few XSLT elements (the associated XPath expression is highlighted):

<xsl:value-of select="price"/>
<xsl:apply-templates select=" /article/section"/>
<xsl:copy-of select="order/items"/>