XSLT

XSLT is the abbreviation for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations. It is one of two parts of the XSL specification and is a language for transforming XML documents (actually the transformation part, T stands for transformation).

XSLT is a XML transformation language, which transforms documents in XML format. To transform in this context means to take all data or part of it (Query of a selection with XPath) and create another XML document or a document in a format which can directly be used for displaying or printing (e.g. an HTML, RTF or TeX document). In particular the transformations involve:

• adding constant text like HTML document type and header information
• moving text
• sorting text

An XML document is a tree on which the transformations are applied. The language is declarative, i.e. a program consist of a collection of several rules which transformations should be performed. The rules are applied recursively.

The XSLT processor checks which rules can be applied and executes the associated transformations based on a sequence of priorities.

You can use XSLT in combination with CSS to produce HTML documents.

An XSLT program is an XML document as the following template shows

 <?xml version="1.0" ?>
 <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 ...

 </xsl:stylesheet>

External links

• Implementations
  • Xalan-Java (http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/)
  • Xalan-C++ (http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/)
  • Sablotron (http://www.gingerall.com/charlie/ga/xml/p_sab.xml)
  • SAXON (http://saxon.sourceforge.net/) by Michael Kay
  • XT (http://www.blnz.com/xt/index) by James Clark
  • Microsoft XSLT engine (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/xmlsdk/htm/xsl_intro_7yw5.asp)

• Documentation
  • XSLT 1.0 W3C Recommendation (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt)
  • XSLT 2.0 W3C Working Draft (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/)
  • Tutorial from develperWorks (http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-hands-on-xsl/index?dwzone=xml) (1 hour)