XSLT, 2nd Edition

The Design of XSLT

XML went from working group to entrenched buzzword in record time. Its flexibility as a language for presenting structured data made it the lingua franca for data interchange. Early adopters used programming interfaces such as the Document Object Model (DOM) and the Simple API for XML (SAX) to parse and process XML documents. As XML became mainstream, however, it was clear that the average web citizen couldn’t be expected to hack Java, Visual Basic, Perl, or Python code to work with documents. What was needed was a flexible, powerful, yet relatively simple language capable of processing XML.

What the world needed was XSLT.

XSLT, the Extensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations, is an official recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It provides a flexible, powerful language for transforming XML documents into something else, such as an HTML document, another XML document, a Portable Document Format (PDF) file, a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file, a Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) file, Java code, a flat text file, a JPEG file, or most anything you want. You write an XSLT stylesheet to define the rules for transforming an XML document, and the XSLT processor does the work.

The W3C has defined two families of standards for stylesheets. The oldest and simplest is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a mechanism used to define various properties of markup elements. Although CSS can be used with XML, it is most often used to style HTML documents. ...