XSL Languages
XSL = Style Sheets for XML
XSL stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language.
XSL describes how XML elements should be displayed.
Since XML does not use predefined elements, the meaning of an element is not well understood. A <table> element could indicate an HTML table, a piece of furniture, or something else - and browsers do not know how to display it!
XSL - More Than a Style Sheet
XSL consists of four parts:
- XSLT - a language for transforming XML documents to other formats
- XPath - a language for navigating in XML documents
- XSL-FO - a language for formatting XML documents (discontinued in 2013)
- XQuery - a language for querying XML documents
With the CSS3 Paged Media Module, W3C has delivered a new standard for document formatting. So, since 2013, CSS3 is proposed as an XSL-FO replacement.
What is XSLT?
- XSLT stands for XSL Transformations
- XSLT is the most important part of XSL
- XSLT transforms an XML document into other formats (like HTML, plain text, XML)
- XSLT uses XPath to navigate in XML documents
- XSLT is a W3C Recommendation
XSLT = XSL Transformations
XSLT is the most important part of XSL.
XSLT is used to transform an XML document into another XML document, or another type of document that is recognized by a browser, like HTML and XHTML. Normally XSLT does this by transforming each XML element into an (X)HTML element.
With XSLT you can add/remove elements and attributes to or from the output file. You can also rearrange and sort elements, perform tests and make decisions about which elements to hide and display, and a lot more.
A common way to describe the transformation process is to say that XSLT transforms an XML source-tree into an XML result-tree.
XSLT Uses XPath
XSLT uses XPath to find information in an XML document. XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in XML documents.
If you want to study XPath first, please read our XPath Tutorial.
How Does it Work?
In the transformation process, XSLT uses XPath to define parts of the source document that should match one or more predefined templates. When a match is found, XSLT will transform the matching part of the source document into the result document.
XSLT Browser Support
All major browsers support XSLT and XPath.
XSLT is a W3C Recommendation
XSLT became a W3C Recommendation 16. November 1999.
