<customer preferred=no way, hosea>
<address>123 Main Street</address>
Or, a pizza store chain can come up with its own set of XML elements that
describes their pizzas.
<crust type=Thick and Chewy/>
<toppings>Olives, Sausage, Pepperoni, Lima Beans</toppings>
A set of defined XML tags used for a particular purpose is an XML vocabulary.
However, as great as it is at organizing information, XML by its very nature is
a raw material. XML is of little use by itself and needs help from its X-Team
teammates to actually make its information usable in the real world.
XSL: Presenting XML Data
Time to pass the baton to the second member of the X-Team: Extensible
Stylesheet Language (XSL). XSL is charged with styling or laying out XML
documents into a form that makes sense to its intended audience. As shown
in Figure 1-2, you use XSL to define a set of formatting rules that are referred
to when an XML document is processed.
For example, if I want to format the letter from the preceding XML to the
rescue section, I use XSL to create a few rules, such as
When a <date> element is found, italicize the dates text.
When a <salutation> element is found, indent salutations text.
When a <closing> element is found, add an extra line after it.
Part I: Getting Started with XSLT