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:

l XPath specifies the syntax for patterns and expressions used in stylesheets. The XSLT processor uses an XPath expression to execute a query on the source document to determine which nodes to operate on. See Writing XPath Expressions.

l XSLT specifies the syntax for a stylesheet that you apply to one XML document to create a new XML, HTML, or text document.

l XSL formatting object language is an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting instructions.