• Chapter 1: Getting Started with Stylus Studio®
• Chapter 2: Editing and Querying XML
• Chapter 3: Converting Non-XML Files to XML
• Chapter 4: Working with XSLT
  • Getting Started with XSLT
    • What Is XSLT?
      • What XSLT Versions Does Stylus Studio Support?
    • What Is a Stylesheet?
    • What Is a Template?
    • How the XSLT Processor Applies a Stylesheet
    • Controlling the Contents of the Result Document
    • Specifying XSLT Patterns and Expressions
    • Frequently Asked Questions About XSLT
    • Sources for Additional XSLT Information
    • Benefits of Using Stylus Studio
  • Tutorial: Understanding How Templates Work
  • Working with Stylesheets
  • Creating Stylesheets That Generate HTML
  • Specifying Extension Functions in Stylesheets
  • Working with Templates
  • Using Third-Party XSLT Processors
  • Validating Result Documents
  • Post-processing Result Documents
  • Generating Formatting Objects
  • Generating Scalable Vector Graphics
  • Generating Java Code for XSLT
  • XSLT Instructions Quick Reference
• Chapter 5: Creating XSLT Using the XSLT Mapper
• Chapter 6: Debugging Stylesheets
• Chapter 7: Defining XML Schemas
• Chapter 8: Defining Document Type Definitions
• Chapter 9: Writing XPath Expressions
• Chapter 10: Working with XQuery in Stylus Studio
• Chapter 11: Composing Web Service Calls
• Chapter 12: Accessing Relational Data as XML
• Chapter 13: Building XML Pipelines
• Chapter 14: Publishing XML Data
• Chapter 15: Integrating with Third-Party File Systems
• Chapter 16: Extending Stylus Studio
• Chapter 17: The Stylus Studio Java API
• Chapter 18: Stylus Studio GUI Reference

Home > Online Product Documentation > Table of Contents > What Is XSLT?

What Is XSLT?

The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) language for manipulating XML data. XSLT is the component of XSL that allows you to write a stylesheet that you can apply to XML documents. The result of applying a stylesheet is that the XSLT processor creates a new XML, HTML, or text document based on the source document. The XSLT processor follows the instructions in the stylesheet. The instructions can copy, omit, and reorganize data in the source document, as well as add new data.

XSL is an XML-based language. It was developed by the W3C XSL working group within the W3C Stylesheets Activity. The W3C activity group has organized its specification of XSL into three parts:

What XSLT Versions Does Stylus Studio Support?

Stylus Studio 2007 supports XSLT 1.0 and XSLT 2.0. The Stylus Studio built-in XSLT processor is version aware, as is the XSLT Mapper. XSLT 2.0 was designed to work with XPath 2.0.

For more information on

To learn more about the changes from XSLT 1.0 to XSLT 2.0, go to http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#changes.