What is XSL?

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KBleivik
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What is XSL?

Post by KBleivik »

While XML defines "languages" that describes data, XSL defines languages that can transform data (XSLT), navigate documents, use XPath and format XML documents (XSL-FO). The term XSL is often misused, because many people think it is the same as XSLT, but in fact XSLT is a subset of XSL. So XSL is a very simple programming language and a superset of XSLT and XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO).

XSL-FO define an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics like XLink specifies link semantics for XML. One of the main goals of XSL-FO is to provide a much more powerful formatting than HTML. XSL-FO processors can for example transform the input document into another format for another formatting prgram, for example

TeX

LaTeX or

Scientific Word


Exstensible Stylsheet Language Transformation, XSLT is both a style sheet specification and a kind of programming language that allows you to transform XML documents into the format of your choice, text, HTML, RTF and other XML dialects. XSLT uses XPath and other technologies to do its work. It is a more powerful tool for displaying XML in a browser than CSS. Not all browsers support XSLT, so it is today more sensible to use XSLT server side. A XSL file (stylesheet) is also a XML file.

Links:
The Extensible Stylesheet Language Family (XSL)

W3 Schools XML tutorials

Note:
The XSLT processor need to be installed for it to function properly with PHP.

XSL and PHP

libxslt
Kjell Gunnar Bleivik
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