18.2.5- XSL

XSL

Having seen how easy it is to create a style sheet for our XML using CSS, we should briefly introduce the Extensible Style sheet Language, or XSL. XSL is far more powerful than CSS, but, if you are only interested in displaying the XML as it is for display on the Web, then CSS is a far simpler option.

There are two key parts to XSL. The first covers its transformation abilities: it can actually be used to transform XML into HTML, or a number of other languages. It is ideal for transforming data into another form for use on the Web.

In addition, there is another area to specify formatting semantics. This is particularly useful for creating print versions of documents, such as PDF or TeX documents.

Undoubtedly one of the prime uses of XSLT at the moment is to transform XML into HTML, and to transform one XML vocabulary into another. XSLT is far too big a subject to go into in depth in this book. And in fact, there are entire Wrox books on the topic including XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference 3rd Edition (Wrox, 2004, ISBN: ISBN: 978-0-7645-6909-8) by Michael Kay, who is also the W3C Editor of the XSLT 2.0 specification.

If you want more information you can also try http://www.w3.org/tr/xslt (version 1.0 of the specification) or the newer 2.0 specification at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/.