SaxonProcessorVsParser

Hallo,

I need to clear the diferrence between an xml parser and an xslt
processor.I mean
doesn't an xslt processor ought to have parsing capabilities as well in
order to first parse
the input document and used xslt document into trees and then apply
templates producing the final tree?
In this case we are talking about the same software (parser and processor),
meaning that
a processor has to be a parser as well.Is this true?

i am using saxon processor to transform xml documents into other xml docs
like svg and gml.
I am using saxon from the dos command prompt by
> java net.sf.saxon.Transform -o output.xml input.xml used.xsl.
At the beginning i was using MSXML which i later laid aside after realizing
that there were
several tasks involving the XSLT 2.0 specification which the particular
processor did not
support.
Among the core services MSXML 4.0 provided was developer support for DOM,
SAX and XSLT1.
I mean as far as i can understand the MSXML environment incorporated a
parser and an xslt
processor as well.
Does the same thing stand for saxon?I might sound naive with this question,
but i need to clear
it out.I ' ve used saxon succesfully for my transformations and my question
only has theoretical
interest.Does saxon use DOM API to parse the input documents into trees and
then carries out
with the rest of the transformation procedure to the final serialization of
the output tree
into the output xml?

Regards
Manousos