The stylesheet above specifies how the various tags work. The ASP <% %>syntax delimits Perl code from HTML. You can execute any code within the stylesheet.

In this example, we use the special XPathScript $t hash reference, which specifies the names of tags and how they should be output to the browser. There are several options for the second level of the hash, and here we see two of those options: pre and post. pre and postspecify (respectfully) what appears before the tag and what appears after it. These values in $t take effect only when we call the apply_templates( ) function, which iterates over the nodes in the XML, executing the matching values in $t.