Introduction to XSLT
by Volker Weber
XSL, or Extensible Stylesheet Language, consists of three languages for converting XML documents into other formats. XSL Formatting Objects (XML FO) describes visual formatting, while XPath accesses specific parts of an XML document. But XSL Transformations (XSLT) is the language for actually converting documents from one XML format into another.
The simplest case starts with two documents: an XML document of original data and an XSLT style sheet for transforming it. An XSLT processor applies the rules from the XSLT style sheet to the XML document to create a new, third document in XHTML, WML, SVG, or almost any other XML format.
Multiple XSLT style sheets can present a single document in multiple formats. A single style sheet could transform multiple instances of one data type into a standard presentation format, which you could change simply by modifying the style sheet. Or XSLT could transform multiple instances of data into multiple formats. And it is not constrained to presentation: XSLT is a powerful tool for translating one system's data format into another's, as in B2B transactions.
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Multiple XSLT style sheets can present a single document in multiple formats. A single style sheet could transform multiple instances of one data type into a standard presentation format, which you could change simply by modifying the style sheet. Or XSLT could transform multiple instances of data into multiple formats. And it is not constrained to presentation: XSLT is a powerful tool for translating one system's data format into another's, as in B2B transactions.
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