XSL Patterns
XML documents represent a tree of nodes. XSL patterns provide a query language for locating nodes in XML documents. After the nodes in the XML document are identified using a pattern, the nodes will be transformed using a template. The XSL patterns we will be using have the same format as the patterns we used with XPath, such as / (child), // (ancestor), .(current node), @ (attribute), and * (wildcard). In addition to the patterns we already mentioned, XSL also has filter operators to manipulate, sort, and filter XML data.