There are two types of elements discussed here: top-level elements and instructions. A top-level element must appear as the child of either <xsl:stylesheet> or <xsl:transform>. An instruction, on the other hand, is associated with a template. A stylesheet may include several templates. A third type of element, not discussed here, is the literal result element (LRE). An LRE also appears in a template. It consists of any non-instruction element that should be copied as-is to the result document, for example, an <hr> element in an HTML conversion stylesheet.

On a related note, any attribute in an LRE and some attributes of a limited number of XSLT elements can also include what is known as an attribute value template. An attribute value template is a string that includes an embedded XPath expression which is used to specify the value of an attribute. At run-time the expression is evaluated and the result of the evaluation is substituted for the XPath expression. For example, assume that a variable "image-dir" is defined as follows:

<xsl:variable name="image-dir">/images</xsl:variable>

The expression to be evaluated is placed inside curly brackets:

<img src="{$image-dir}/mygraphic.jpg"/>

This would result in the following:

<img src="/images/mygraphic.jpg"/>

The element annotations that follow include a description, a syntax listing, a list of required and optional attributes, a description of type and position, its source in the W3C Recommendation and an explanation of the degree of present Gecko support.

• <xsl:apply-imports>
• <xsl:apply-templates>
• <xsl:attribute>
• <xsl:attribute-set>
• <xsl:call-template>
• <xsl:choose>
• <xsl:comment>
• <xsl:copy>
• <xsl:copy-of>
• <xsl:decimal-format>
• <xsl:element>
• <xsl:fallback> (not supported)
• <xsl:for-each>
• <xsl:if>
• <xsl:import> (mostly supported)
• <xsl:include>
• <xsl:key>
• <xsl:message>
• <xsl:namespace-alias> (not supported)
• <xsl:number> (partially supported)
• <xsl:otherwise>
• <xsl:output> (partially supported)
• <xsl:param>
• <xsl:preserve-space>
• <xsl:processing-instruction>
• <xsl:sort>
• <xsl:strip-space>
• <xsl:stylesheet> (partially supported)
• <xsl:template>
• <xsl:text> (partially supported)
• <xsl:transform>
• <xsl:value-of> (partially supported)
• <xsl:variable>
• <xsl:when>
• <xsl:with-param>