XML: Style_Sheets: XSL

XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) is a language for expressing stylesheets for XML documents. It consists of two parts: a language for transforming XML documents, and an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics.

The originality and power of XSL is to be more general than just describing how XML documents should be presented and to allow as well to describe how these documents can be transformed into other documents.

The part of XSL dealing with document transformation is called XSLT. The part of XSL dealing with formatting objects is called XSL-FO.

XSL and XSLT are currently the object of working drafts at the W3C.

Documentation

This category is for sites which offer comprehensive, method-by-method, property-by-property reference documentation.

Sites listed here should be similar to technical reference manuals where you can look up a given method or property and get a concise explanation of it.

Step-by-step tutorials should be listed under "Tutorials."

FAQs, Help, and Tutorials

"Tutorials" links to from-the-beginning, step-by-step online tutorials which introduce this topic to beginners. Brief articles/TechNotes on specific topics should go in the "Articles and TechNotes" category.

Method-by-method, property-by-property reference documentation should go in the "Documentation" category.

Slide and streaming audio presentations should go in the "Presentations" category.

Implementations

"Implementations" is for indexing software which is designed to perform the functions defined for XSL or XSLT.

The listed software may be either stand alone, or components of other programs or systems.

Mailing Lists

"Mailing Lists" indexes the home pages for mailing lists you can subscribe to to learn more about this topic. Where possible, include the "subscribe" link in the description itself.

Example: _Joe's XSL Mailing List_ (link to home page) is a weekly bulletin about XSL-related news.

Resources

Sites which cover multiple aspects of XSL, including catalogues, guides, portals and surveys.

Tools

What tools are there available specifically for XSL and XSLT?

XPath

XPath is always used in conjunction with XSL. Or, to put it another way, an XSLT statement always has a small (or big) piece of XPath in it. XPath is not valid XML, while XSL is.

XSL-FO

XSLT and XSL-FO are related as variants on XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language). However FO refers to Formatting Objects, whereas XSLT refers to Transformations. The difference being that XSLT transforms from one format to another and FO is intended to be used in areas where exact output/positioning is required - such as in printing.