XSLT
XSLT is the abbreviation for Extended Stylesheet Language Transformations. It is one of two parts of the XSL specifiation and is a language for transforming XML documents (actually the transformation part, T stands for transformation).
XSLT is a programming 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.
An example of an XSLT processor has been implemented by James Clark in Java. Microsoft as well has a XSLT processor which works as well in older versions of their operating systems.
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>
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