Tutorial: Understanding How Templates Work

When Stylus Studio creates a new stylesheet, it contains one template, which matches the root node. However, this template is empty. If you apply the new stylesheet as is, the result document has no contents. To generate a result document with contents, you need to add instructions to the template that matches the root node.

All stylesheets have two default templates that do not appear in the stylesheet itself. It is important for you to understand how the default templates work so that you can

When you can do this, you can write a stylesheet that generates a dynamic Web page that displays your information.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for defining a stylesheet that generates a dynamic Web page from an XML document. The tutorial shows how the default templates work, and it provides instructions for defining templates that instantiate the default templates. It also provides instructions for adding HTML markup to the stylesheet. The result is a dynamic Web page that displays the particular information you choose.

Each of the following topics contains instructions for defining the stylesheet. You should perform the steps in each topic before you move on to the next topic. After the first topic, some steps depend on actions you performed in a previous topic. This section organizes the process as follows:

This tutorial duplicates some of the information in subsequent sections. For complete information, see the following topics: