Xslt

I'm not sure I understand.

Sorry, I'll try and make myself a bit clearer.

In fact, "How, exactly, does XSLT work?", is the simplest thing to ask.

You link in an XSLT stylesheet at the top of your XML document. The XSLT stylesheet defines a transformation that turns the XML document into an HTML document. If you go to w3schools.com, they have a pretty good introduction, though none of their stuff on anything goes into much depth.