XSLT Processing at a Glance

XSLT processing involves the following basic steps:

• Reading the XML source document and the associated XSLT style sheets.
• Parsing XML files, and then their associated XSLT files, into trees of nodes. Each node corresponds to an XML document element or attribute.
• Applying XSLT transformation to the source trees.
• Producing result trees according to the specification of the XSLT style sheet.
• Serializing the result trees as output files. These files output XML, HTML, or other text formats.

MSXML versions 4.0 and later support an XML parser and a built-in XSLT processor. The parser translates the textual (or serialized) XML documents (including the XSLT style sheets, which are XML documents themselves) into tree representations. The XSLT processor works with these representations.