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Your first transformation

The smallest useful stylesheet matches the document root and emits some HTML. This one turns the CD catalog into a table.

cdcatalog.xsl
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">                              <!-- (1)! -->
<html>
<body>
  <h2>My CD Collection</h2>
  <table border="1">
    <tr bgcolor="#9acd32">
      <th style="text-align:left">Title</th>
      <th style="text-align:left">Artist</th>
    </tr>
    <xsl:for-each select="catalog/cd">                <!-- (2)! -->
    <tr>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="title"/></td>         <!-- (3)! -->
      <td><xsl:value-of select="artist"/></td>
    </tr>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </table>
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
  1. match="/" matches the document root — the rule fires once, for the whole document. Everything inside is the template for what to output.
  2. xsl:for-each loops over every <cd> element under <catalog>.
  3. xsl:value-of pulls out the text of a child element and writes it into the result.

Anatomy of a stylesheet

A stylesheet is itself a well-formed XML document.

  • The root element is xsl:stylesheet (or its synonym xsl:transform).
  • The xsl: prefix is bound to the namespace http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform. The processor uses this namespace to tell instructions (things it should execute) apart from literal result elements (things it should copy to the output, like <html> and <table>).
  • version="1.0" selects the XSLT version. 1.0 is universally supported; 2.0 and 3.0 add more features but need a processor like Saxon.

The result

Applied to the catalog, this produces an HTML table:

My CD Collection

Title Artist
Empire Burlesque Bob Dylan
Hide your heart Bonnie Tyler
Greatest Hits Dolly Parton

Next

The single big template works, but it does not scale: as documents grow you end up with one giant rule. Templates show how to break the work into small, composable pieces.