Where to get info on writing a new XSL file?

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Hi, I'm new to XSL, but I'm willing to teach myself if someone can point me at the things I need to read. Here's what I'm trying to do...

I have a to-do list in an XML format generated by another tool (JSync and PalmOS).

I want the following to happen...

1. When I import this list into FreeMind, I want the to-do items to overwrite the corresponding nodes in FreeMind, but to *leave alone* all the other nodes.

2. When I import into FreeMind, I want the text value of the <category/> tag to get inserted into the text of the corresponding node as a bracketed string (for example, [Actionable]).

3. When I export from FreeMind, I want only nodes with a certain format to get exported (for example, STYLE="bubble").

4. When I export from FreeMind, I want nodes that contain a bracketed string (for example again, [Actionable]) to get stripped out and put in as <category text="Actionable"/> tag in the exported XML.

Now, can someone explain to me like I'm a four-year-old who has never touched an XSLT file before what I'd need to do in order to accomplish this, and what I'd need to read in order to understand the answer you give me? :-)

Thank you, and I hope to soon slap together something useful for the community.

PS: Why am I doing this? It's my approach to GTD... I could keep my planning ("vertical thinking") on FreeMind, and export just the terminal nodes that require physical action into my PDA.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Following up... can an XSL file specify two inputs? For instance, read file A and for each element in file A, find an element with the same @id in file B and in the output file replace that element with the one from file A?

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Here is pseudocode for what I'm trying to get the export XSL to do...

if name = node
    if style = bubble
        create tag
            copy over the text attribute
            create a category attribute and
                give it the value of the
                bracketed string from the
                text attribute, deleting
                that string
            create a done attribute
            if the node color is gray and it has a small text size
                set done = TRUE
            else set done = FALSE
            endif
        close tag
    enif
endif

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Sorry about the indents getting messed up, but you get the idea.

I don't know if the "bubble style nodes only" import can even be done with XSL, so I'm starting with the easier-seeming export problem.