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XSL

EXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a set of recommendations defined by the W3C.

XSL is composed of the following three W3C recommendations:

XSL Transformations (XSLT): This is an XML markup language that is used for the transformation of XML documents.

XML Path Language (XPath): This is a language used to access or refer to parts of an XML document.

XSL-FO: This is an XML markup language that is used to format information for the purpose of presentation, similarly to the way that HTML marks up information fro presentation by a Web browser.

XML document transformations defined using XSLT are XML documents. The elements present in the XSLT document are defined in the XSLT namespace. We discuss namespaces later in this chapter.

An XSLT transformation processor is required when transforming a document using XSLT. The processor takes as input a source XML document and an XSLT transformation document. The transformations defined in an XSLT document are used to transform the source file into the output file. XSLT uses pattern matching and templates to define the required transformation. When a pattern defined in the XSLT transformation document is found in the source document, the associated template, also defined in the XSLT transformation document, is placed in the output file.

The output file produced is typically another XML document.

Detailed information about XSLT can be found at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt.html

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