Barbara,
Just to show it can be done:-
Here are an html file and an xsl file. Save the html file as .html, .xhtml and .xml. Save the xsl file as test_xsl.xml. Then view the three versions of the html file in your browser. The .html version will ignore the reference to the xsl file and revert to default styling, whereas the other two will use the styling in the xsl file.
However, if you want to extract text from an xhtml file why not open it with your Word processor and then save it as a text document. This will strip out all the tags with the exception of the <?xml version=...> and the <?xml-stylesheet....> processing instructions. Much easier than messing about with xslt!
Patrick
HTML file
---------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="test_xsl.xml"?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Henry Joseph Brennan</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Henry Joseph Brennan</h1>
<p>Henry Joseph (Harry) Brennan was born in Jarrow on 21st July 1899. He was baptised at St. Bede's Church on 23rd July, his godparents being his uncle Harry Kelly and aunt Alice Daly. At the age of 13 he was enrolled in Mount St. Mary's College, a Catholic Boarding School at Spinkhill near Sheffield. On Thursday, 11th April 1918 he was killed at Steenwerck in Belgium during the first phase of the <a href="lys.html">Battles of the Lys</a> (April 7th - 25th 1918). The following excerpt is taken from "The Mountaineer" the college magazine, commenting on Harry's death:</p>
</body>
</html>
XSL file
-------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:xforms="http://localhost/xsl/xforms">
<xsl:output type="html" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<body>
<xsl:apply-templates select="*" />
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="title">
<title>
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</title>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="h1">
<p style="font-size:18pt; color:blue">
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</p>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="p">
<p style="color:red">
<xsl:apply-templates />
</p>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="a">
<a style="color:blue">
<xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="@href"/></xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</a>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>