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Introduction to XSL

XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) is a language for expressing style sheets. It consists of three parts: XSLT, XPath, and XSL Formatting Objects.

CSS - The Style Sheet of HTML

Because HTML uses predefined tags, the meanings of these tags are well understood: The <p> element defines a paragraph and the <h1> element defines a heading; and the browser knows how to display them.

Adding styles to HTML elements with CSS is simple. Telling a browser to display each element in a special font or color, is easy to do and easy for a browser to understand. 

XSL - The Style Sheet of XML

Because XML does not use predefined tags (we can use any tags we want), the meanings of these tags are not understood: <table> could mean an HTML table, a piece of furniture, or something else. A browser does not know how to display an XML document.

Therefore there must be something in addition to the XML document that describes how the document should be displayed; and that is XSL!

XSL - More than a Style Sheet

XSL consists of three parts:

• XSLT (a language for transforming XML documents)
• XPath (a language for defining parts of an XML document)
• XSL Formatting Objects (a vocabulary for formatting XML documents)

If you don't understand the meaning of this, think of XSL as a language that can transform XML into XHTML, a language that can filter and sort XML data, a language that can define parts of an XML document, a language that can format XML data based on the data value, like displaying negative numbers in red, and a language that can output XML data to different devices, like screen, paper or voice. 

XSL is a W3C Standard

XSL is a standard recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium.

The first two parts of the language (XSLT and XPath) became a W3C Recommendation in November 1999. The full XSL Recommendation including XSL formatting became a W3C Recommendation in October 2001.

Click here to read more about the W3C XSL activities.

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