- XSL Transformations (XSLT), and
- XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO).
- a stylesheet separates contents and logical structure from presentation (as with CSS)
- an XSLT stylesheet is an XML document defining a transformation from one class of XML documents into another
- XSLT is not intended as a completely general-purpose XML transformation language - it is designed for XSL Formatting Objects as transformation target language - nevertheless: XSLT is generally useful
- XSL-FO is an XML language for specifying formatting in a more low-level and detailed way than possible with HTML+CSS
The basic idea of XSLT:
An XSLT stylesheet:
- is declarative and uses pattern matching and templates to specify the transformation
- is vastly more expressive than a CSS stylesheet
- may perform arbitrary computations (it is theoretically Turing complete!)
Tools:
- on the Web, XSLT transformation can be done either on the client (e.g. Explorer or Mozilla), or on the server (e.g. Apache Xalan) - either as pre-processing or on-the-fly
- in the future, Web browsers only need to understand XSLT and XSL-FO (rendering HTML/XHTML can be done using a standard stylesheet)
- today, the target language is typically XHTML which is understood by current browsers
- XSLT is widely implemented - XSL-FO is not yet...
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