Extensible Style Language (XSL)

XSL is the style language for XML

XSL handles the problem of preparing the presentation of an XML document

It can be used to convert XML to other formats including HTML, RTF, and others

It is under active development by the W3C

It is useful because XML is concerned with the structure of information and not its display

Style sheets for XML are more difficult than for HTML

We define our own tags, so, XSL must specify how each element should be presented and what the element is

XSL allows us to create style sheets that control the presentation of XML files

It defines a language for expressing style sheets and a vocabulary of formatting objects

The part of XSL that handles style rules is called XSL Transformation (XSLT), a language for transforming XML files

The part of XSL that defines the style of XML elements is called XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO), an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics

An XSL style sheet tells a processor how to convert the logical structure of the XML file into the presentational structure of the transformed document

The source tree of the XML document is transformed into the results tree of another type of document (based on HTML, RTF and other formats)

The results tree is the presentational structure that can be displayed by a browser, printed, etc.

It is important to understand that the transformation part (XSLT) can be used independently of the formatting semantics (XSL-FO)

Common transformations include converting XML to HTML, changing the order of elements, and selectively processing elements

Sadly, most XSL implementations support only the transformation part of XSL

They are beginning to address the formatting objects

What you can do with XSL that you can't do with CSS

Change the order of elements for display

Process elements more than once

Suppress elements in one place and present them in another

Add generated text to the presentation

Home xsl xsl 2 xsl 3 xsl 4 xsl 5 xsl 6 xsl 7 xsl 8 xsl 9 Next xsl 10 xsl 11 xsl 12 xsl 13 xsl 14 xsl 15 xsl 16 xsl 17

Page by Howard Rosenbaum
Find me at hrosenba@indiana.edu	You are here: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/hrosenba/www/Workshops/XML/Demo/xsl.html