Chapter 5. HTML output

Introducing the topic of HTML at such an early point in a book on XSLT and XSL (a competing formatting language) may seem premature. There should, over time, appear a number of typesetting systems, DTP packages and screen rendering browsers that can format data held in XSL format; and when this happens, XSLT and XSL will be used together to provide a complete formatting solution. But in the meantime, the most popular formatting language in use on the Web happens to be HTML. XSLT is currently most often employed to transform XML documents into HTML documents, for presentation in current-generation Web browsers. This chapter therefore covers the issues involved in outputting HTML. Readers not intending to use XSLT to format XML documents into HTML can safely ignore this chapter (though Chapter 18 provides an overview that may assist with understanding the examples in later chapters).