Chapter 11. Ajax Using XSLT

"But wait, there's more ...."

I do so feel like someone hawking my wares on a late-night infomercial, but hey, it's true. There is actually more to Ajax than what we've already covered. In fact, we're about to get to one of my favorite parts. I've jokingly referred to the material covered up to this point as "mad scientist stuff," but the material that we're about to cover transcends everything that we've covered up till now. It is called eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations, or XSLT, and I like to think of it as magic. Think of XSLT as the part of a spell that says what to do. The second part of the spell is XPath, which acts as the targeting device for the spell. Tightly intertwined, XSLT and XPath work together to modify or, if you prefer, transform XML.