What's Your Mental Image of XSLT?

I'm getting to grips with XSLT at the moment, and not loving the O'Reilly book, I'd have to say.

But I realised this morning that one problem is that I don't really have a little picture in my head of what XSLT does.

XSL Transformations, as everyone is careful to tell you, are very much not procedural, but they're not really like OO programming as far as I can see, although it's all about objects. You aren't even guaranteed that your elements come out in document order, right?

So, I have a mental picture of what happens when perl does

while(<FH>)
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which is like the file being fed through a machine, say a grinder, and I have a mental picture of how regexes work, which involves a team of ants crawling along strings (some of them stay behind to mark the places when alternation is involved) and so on.

Objects, I've decided, get fed their methods, bulge a little, then spit something out. All you get to see is the mouth.

But I don't have a mental model of an XSLT transformation.

Has anyone else? It's all about Trees, so do you see a monkey climbing the tree and picking the elements off as fruit?

I know I can't be the only one who needs a visual, no matter how strange, in order to think through these kinds of things

... can I?

($_='kkvvttuubbooppuuiiffssqqffssmmiibbddllffss')
 =~y~b-v~a-z~s;                             print
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