1. introduction

XML is a standard which can be used to describe the structural and semantic components of a text. Encoding a text in XML can be very useful for a number of reasons. One of the most important advantages is that it enables computers to search the texts for their contents beyond free text searches. XML tags are added primarily to enable machines to process the text more intelligently.

For human beings, such explicit encoding is normally not needed. They may even be distracting. Human readers prefer to read texts in which the structure has been clarified through typographical means, such as font sizes, font colours, margins, et cetera. If a text is laid out using typography, human readers can usually access the contents of the text without any conscious efforts.

If we want to make texts which have been encoded in XML more readable or more usable for human readers, we generally need to convert these documents into other types of files. We may choose transform these XML documents into HTML files, or into PDF files, for example. For conversions such as these, we can make use of the eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations (XSLT). Like XML, XSLT was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This tutorial contains step-by-step instructions on how to write an XSLT stylesheet.

Requirements

• A basic knowledge of XML and HTML is assumed.
• You can download all the files that are disucussed in this tutorial from this website.