XSLT
computer science, XSLT is the abbreviation for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations. It is a part of the XSL specification and is a language for transforming XML documents.
XSLT is a XML transformation language, which transforms documents in XML format. To transform in this context means to take all data or part of it (Query of a selection with XPath) and create another XML document or a document in a format which can directly be used for displaying or printing (e.g. an HTML, RTF or TeX document). In particular the transformations involve:
- adding constant text like HTML document type and header information
- moving text
- sorting text
An XML document is a tree on which the transformations are applied. The language is declarative, i.e. a program consist of a collection of several rules which transformations should be performed. The rules are applied recursively.
The XSLT processor checks which rules can be applied and executes the associated transformations based on a sequence of priorities.
You can use XSLT in combination with CSS to produce HTML documents.
An XSLT program is an XML document as the following template shows
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
...
</xsl:stylesheet>
STX is intended as a high-speed, low memory consumption alternative to XSLT.
Example
This example is taken from .
Example: A function calculating factorial as an example of XSLT recursion. Note that xsl:function is part of XSLT 2.0, which is not yet a finished W3C Recommendation.
<xsl:function name="eg:fact">
<xsl:param name="n"/>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="$n = 1 or $n = 0">
<xsl:value-of select="1"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select="$n * eg:fact($n - 1)"/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:function>
