Elements

Elements

There are two types of elements discussed here: top-level elements and instructions. A top-level element must appear as the child of either <xsl:stylesheet> or <xsl:transform>. An instruction, on the other hand, is associated with a template. A stylesheet may include several templates. A third type of element, not discussed here, is the literal result element (LRE). An LRE also appears in a template. It consists of any non-instruction element that should be copied as-is to the result document, for example, an <hr> element in an HTML conversion stylesheet.

On a related note, any attribute in an LRE and some attributes of a limited number of XSLT elements can also include what is known as an attribute value template. An attribute value template is simply a string that includes an embedded XPath expression which is used to specify the value of an attribute. At run-time the expression is evaluated