Is it possible to apply an XSLT transform to a DOM element?

Question

I have a webpage that has many user-generated elements that need to be "cleaned" and I'd like the cleanup to be expressed as an XSLT transform because it suits the purpose quite well.

Is there a way to apply an XSLT transform to part of a webpage? (And does the source element have to be checked by something akin to tagsoup first, to make sure it's well-formed?)

All the examples I find are about fetching an XML file and an XSL file, via Ajax, and running one against the other, but not taking a subset of the DOM and running an XSLT on it. Can it be done?

Answer 1

What is the context you want to do that in? Is the document ("web page") already loaded in a browser window? Some browsers expose an API to Javascript to apply XSLT to DOM nodes e.g. Mozilla introduced an API and other browsers like Opera have copied it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/using_the_mozilla_javascript_interface_to_xsl_transformations.

And of course there is Saxon-CE that runs inside the browser: http://www.saxonica.com/ce/doc/contents.html. That even allows you to apply XSLT 2.0 to DOM nodes.

Answer 2

Since HTML is not XML, I don't think you will be able to perform an XSLT transform on an HTML page. However, you will be able to do it on an XHTML page.