The XSLT reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004
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XSLT

Helping orphans the way you would do it

In computer science, XSLT is the abbreviation for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations. It is one of two parts of the XSL specification and is a language for transforming XML documents (actually the transformation part, T stands for transformation). The other half of the XSL specification being XSLF (where F stands for Formatting Objects. Alternatively referred to as XSL-FO, or XSLFO).

XSLT is a XML transformation 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:

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.

You can use XSLT in combination with CSS to produce HTML documents.

An XSLT program is an XML document as the following template shows 




...

STX is intended as a high-speed, low memory consumption alternative to XSLT.

Example

This example is taken from [1].

Example: A function calculating factorial as an example of XSLT recursion.

External links