Home >Online Product Documentation >Table of Contents >Working with Templates
Templates define the actions that you want the XSLT processor to perform. When you apply a stylesheet to an XML source document, the XSLT processor populates the result document by instantiating a sequence of templates. This is illustrated in Understanding How the Default Templates Work.
A template can contain elements that specify literal result nodes. It can also contain elements that are XSLT instructions for creating result nodes. In a template, the template rule is the pattern that the XSLT processor matches against (compares with) selected nodes in the source document.
This section covers the following topics: