XSLT

XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or into XSL Formatting Objects, which may subsequently be converted to other formats, such as PDF, PostScript and PNG.

The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. Typically, input documents are XML files, but anything from which the processor can build an XQuery and XPath Data Model can be used, for example relational database tables, or geographical information systems.

XSLT is a Turing-complete language, meaning it can specify any computation that can be performed by a computer.

History

XSLT is influenced by functional languages, and by text-based pattern matching languages like SNOBOL and awk. Its most direct predecessor is DSSSL, which did for SGML what XSLT does for XML.