XSL Patterns

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XSL Patterns provide a simple query language for identifying nodes in an XML document, based on their type, name, and values, as well as the relationship of the node to other nodes in the document. For instance, the query "find 'author' elements that have a 'period' attribute with the value 'classical', and that are contained in the 'authors' element at the document root" can be expressed as an XSL Pattern of the form "/authors/author[@period='classical']".

These simple queries are a core part of XSL transformations, which associate the query results with templates to create a new XML document. Queries using the XSL Pattern syntax can also be performed directly against the Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5 XML Document Object Model (DOM).

Internet Explorer 5 implements XSL Patterns as described in Section 2.6 of the Extensible Stylesheet Language (December 18th Working Draft), found at http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xsl-19981216.html , with the following exceptions:

• first-of-any()
• last-of-any()
• first-of-type()
• last-of-type()
• ancestor-or-self()

The Internet Explorer 5 XSL release also contains a number of extensions to enhance the capabilities of XSL. See extensions to the XSL Pattern Language (2.6) as described in the XQL Proposal at http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/pp/xql.html .

Relevant topics:

• Introduction to the Syntax of XSL Patterns
• How the DOM Defines the Context for XSL Pattern Queries
• How XSL Defines the Context for XSL Pattern Queries
• Placing a List of Items into a Grid with the context() Method
• Creating a Comma-Separated List of Items with the context() Method

Further information can be found in the related topics:

• XSL Patterns Reference
• Getting Started with XSL
• Authoring Match Patterns