Understanding XML style sheet processing instructions

Processing instructions are added to the result of the transformation by using the xsl:processing-instruction element. If you want to include a stylesheet file like compact.css to your html file output, then you would look for a statement like,

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<?xml-stylesheet href="compact.css" type="text/css">

in the output. This type of output can be given by using the xsl:processing-instruction element in the xsl file you are creating for your xml file. With this method you can also create alternate stylesheets for your web pages.

<xsl:processing-instruction name="xml-stylesheet">
<xsl:text>href="compact.css" type="text/css"</xsl:text>
</xsl:processing-instruction>

The above code is a processing instruction that will give you the result in which you will have the "xml-stylesheet" tag. In the output you can note that the processing instruction outputted ends with '>' and not '?>'. This is because the output was set to be html. If the output of the transformation is some other format then the processing instruction in the result would end with '?>'.