index.md

---

title: <xsl:stylesheet>
slug: Web/XSLT/Element/stylesheet
spec-urls: https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/#stylesheet-element

---

{{XSLTRef}}{{QuickLinksWithSubpages("/en-US/docs/Web/XSLT")}}

The <xsl:stylesheet> element (or the equivalent <xsl:transform> element) is the outermost element of a stylesheet.

Namespace Declaration

A pseudo-attribute required to identify the document as an XSLT stylesheet. Typically this is xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform".

Syntax

<xsl:stylesheet
  version="NUMBER"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  id="NAME"
  extension-element-prefixes="LIST-OF-NAMES"
  exclude-result-prefixes="LIST-OF-NAMES">
    ENTIRE STYLESHEET
</xsl:stylesheet>

Required Attributes

• version

  • : Specifies the version of XSLT required by this stylesheet.

Optional Attributes

• exclude-result-prefixes

  • : Specifies any namespace used in this document that should not be sent to the output document. The list is whitespace separated.

• extension-element-prefixes

  • : Specifies a space-separated list of any namespace prefixes for extension elements in this document.

• default-collation

  • : Specifies the default collation used by all {{Glossary("XPath")}} expressions appearing in attributes or text value templates that have the element as an ancestor, unless overridden by another default-collation attribute on an inner element. It also determines the collation used by certain XSLT constructs (such as <xsl:key> and <xsl:for-each-group>) within its scope.

• default-mode

  • : Defines the default value for the mode attribute of all <xsl:template> and <xsl:apply-templates> elements within its scope.

• default-validation

  • : Defines the default value of the validation attribute of all relevant instructions appearing within its scope.

• expand-text

  • : Determines whether descendant text nodes of the element are treated as text value templates.

• id

  • : Specifies an id for this stylesheet. This is most often used when the stylesheet is embedded in another XML document.

• input-type-annotations

  • : Specifies whether type annotations are stripped from the element so the same results are produced whether the source documents have been validated against a schema or not.

• use-when

  • : Determines whether the element and all the nodes that have it as ancestor are excluded from the stylesheet.

• xpath-default-namespace

  • : Specifies the namespace that will be used if the element name is unprefixed or an unprefixed type name within an XPath expression.

Type

Required outermost element of stylesheet.

Specifications

{{Specifications}}