XML
In my view, without XSL (XSL is basically like a stylesheet, except it has its own syntax) XML is not very practical. XSL allows you to extract the data of a tag and format it however you want.
Say you have an XML document that looks like this:
<person> <name>Sam Huggill</name></person>
This is very simple, but with XSL you can extractthe value in-between the <name> and </name> tags and formatit. We extract the value of a tag using the <xsl:value-of> tag:
<xsl:value-ofselect="/person/name"/>
(Notice the closing />. This means that the tag does not need another </xsl:value-of> tag). Easy.
But what happens when we have a more complicated XML document:
<people> <person> <name>Sam Huggill</name> <email>sam@vbsquare.com</email> </person> <person> <name>Yourname</name> <email>youremail</email> </person></people>
For this we will have to set up a loop to write the data from both <person> tags. We loop using the <xsl:for-each> tag:
<xsl:for-eachselect="people/person"> <xsl:value-of select="name"/> <xsl:value-of select="email"/></xsl:for-each>
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