Let’s take a closer look at an example with more elements to transform. This slide will be useful to come back to as we continue on throughout this tutorial, but let’s have an introductory look now. We’ll add more details later.
Looking at the templates themselves: You will notice that each template in
the stylesheet is represented by an <xsl:template> element. The
@match attribute tells us what element on the input tree we are dealing
with. This attribute essentially specifies a condition that has to be met:
"if we find the "x" element, perform this transformation." It is important
to note that the value of @match specifies a location on the tree. This
means that we can provide different rules for elements when they occur in
different contexts. We can treat a <persName> that occurs in
<body> differently than we treat a <persName> that occurs
in the <teiHeader>. We will learn how to specify the context of the
element later in this primer.
Now that we know how the <xsl:template> interacts with the input tree,
we should ask: what does the template do? Inside these templates, there is a
snippet of the output tree (in this case, html). There is also the
<xsl:apply-templates> element, which essentially indicates to the
stylesheet: don’t stop here! go back and process the children or spit out
text! Another, more precise way of interpreting this element is to
say "go ahead and process any children of the matched element." Without this
instruction, the stylesheet logic reaches a dead end.
