Extensible Stylesheet Language

Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a language which allows one to describe how files encoded in the XML standard are to be formatted. The language has two parts

• XSL Transformations (XSLT): an XML transformation language
• XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO): to describe additional formatting

These two parts are maintained by the W3C.

There are currently many XSLT implementations available; recent versions of both Internet Explorer and Mozilla (hence Netscape Navigator) support transformation of XML to HTML through XSLT.

XSL formatting objects are less widely supported. Most (?all) current implementations are only partial. FOP, from the Apache project, can render a large portion of the XSL formatting objects specification to PDF and other output formats. The PassiveTeX package is another implementation that uses TeX to convert the output of an XSL-FO stylesheet to PDF.

More file formats are supported to various degrees.

• PostScript
• SVG
• MIF
• PCL
• text files

XML Path Language (XPath) is used in XSLT to describe how to access parts of an XML document.

See Also

• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• XSLT

External links

• XSL language definition
• Extensible Stylesheet Language
• What is XSL-FO?
• XML Focus Topics : CSS, XSL, XSL-FO
• XSL formatter
• Apache FOP
• IBM XSL Formatting Objects Composer
• W3Cschools XSL Tutorial