The XSLT stands for Extensible StyleSheet Language Transformation.  The XSLT adds style sheets to XML document. XSLT transforms XML document to another XML document, HTML webpage, plain text, SVG, PDF postscript, etc... XSLT creates another document from the input document.

Since XML does not use predefined tags, such as table, div, span…etc as in HTML, browser would have no information on how to display it’s tags. XSL add details of how to display XML document. XSL is combination of XSLT which transforms the documents, XPath which helps in navigation of document, XSL-FO which formats the XML documents and XQuery a language for querying XML documents.

The XSLT Processor takes one or more XML source documents, XSLT stylesheets and process them to produce output document. Few popular XSLT processors are Altova RaptorXML Server, libxslt, MSXML, Saxon, Xalan …etc.  The XSLT stylesheet is written in XML format. The XSLT processor applies the transformation rules taken from XSLT stylesheet, on XML document. The output document generated can be utilized by XML formatter (XSL-FO) to generate actual output to be displayed by end user. Advatage of XSLT is it is independent of XML document. The web-designer can change XSLT and change the output file.

 

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