XSL Languages

XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents.

XPath is a language for defining parts of an XML document.

This Tutorial will focus on XSLT and XPath

Most of the chapters in this tutorial will focus on XSLT and XPath. We will use XSLT to define XML transformations and XPath to define the matching patterns for the transformations.

XSLT - XSL Transformations

XSLT is the most important part of the XSL Standard. It is the part of XSL that is used to transform an XML document into another XML document, or another type of document that is recognized by a browser. One such format is XHTML. Normally XSLT does this by transforming each XML element into an XHTML element.

XSLT can also add new elements into the output file, or remove elements. It can rearrange and sort elements, and test and make decisions about which elements to display, and a lot more.

A common way to describe the transformation process is to say that XSL uses XSLT to transform an XML source tree into an XML result tree.

How does it work?

In the transformation process, XSLT uses XPath to define parts of the source document that match one or more predefined templates. When a match is found, XSLT will transform the matching part of the source document into the result document. The parts of the source document that do not match a template will end up unmodified in the result document.

Even though XSL consists of three different parts with three different names, we will use the general term XSL in this tutorial.

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How we converted to XHTML