XSL Languages
It started with XSL and ended up with XSLT, XPath,
and XSL-FO.
It Started with XSL
XSL stands for EXtensible Stylesheet Language.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) started to develop XSL because there was
a need for an XML-based Stylesheet Language.
CSS = Style Sheets for HTML
HTML uses predefined tags, and the meaning of each tag is well
understood.
The <table> tag in HTML defines a table - and a browser knows
how to display it.
Adding styles to HTML elements are simple. Telling a browser to display
an element
in a special font or
color, is easy with CSS.
XSL = Style Sheets for XML
XML does not use predefined tags (we can use any tag-names we like), and
therefore the meaning of each tag is not well understood.
A
<table> tag could mean an HTML table, a piece of furniture, or
something else - and a browser does not know how to
display it.
XSL describes how the XML document should be displayed!
XSL - More Than a Style Sheet Language
XSL
consists of three parts:
- XSLT - a language for transforming XML documents
- XPath - a language for navigating in XML documents
- XSL-FO - a language for formatting XML documents
This Tutorial is About XSLT
The rest of this tutorial is about XSLT - the language for transforming XML
documents.
To learn more about XPath and XSL-FO, visit our
XPath Tutorial and our
XSL-FO Tutorial.
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