XSLT

Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is a functional language for transforming XML documents into other formats.

The transformation is performed by an XSLT transformation processor. Popular implementations of XSLT processors are Xalan, Saxon, MSXSL. XSLT 1.0 is supported by all popular browsers. XSLT 2.0 is supported in major language libraries and Apis. A popular extension to XSLT 1.0 is EXSLT.

A typical XSLT transformation takes as input one or more well-formed XML documents and an XSLT document, and produces text as output, which can be XML, XML fragment, HTML, text or other format that can be built through text (e.g., RTF, PDF).

XSLT uses Xpath for location of source tree nodes to be processed. Processing is usually performed through templates that are compared to the source nodes during tree processing. If there is matching, the template is processed. Usually other templates are called recursively.

It is important to check the version of XSLT used. Most browsers support XSLT 1.0 (with Xpath 1.0). Some processors (used as standalone applications or in popular language libraries) support XSLT 2.0 (with Xpath 2.0).