Introduction

XML is one of the biggest things to hit the World Wide Web since the invention of the Web itself. It has the simplicity of HTML, looking much like it, but at the same time it is much more powerful. This power comes from its generic nature, which makes XML useful for a myriad of applications, not just on the Web, but in any (distributed) computing environment.

If you want to manipulate XML, you have several choices. By far the most powerful is XSLT, which enables you to do very powerful things with the data stored in an XML document. What makes XSLT so interesting is that it is remarkably simple, but at the same time very powerful. Operations that require many lines of code with conventional techniques can be solved in XSLT with just a few lines of code because XSLT uses a completely different programming paradigm, one that you’ll learn to love during the course of reading this book.