5 / 18

XSL overview

W3C technology for transforming and formatting XML
split into the two separate standards – XSLT and XSL-FO
XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language)
- describes transformation from XML to another XML, HTML or plain text
- uses XPath as a query and expression language
XSL-FO (Formatting Objects)
- set of abstract objects that can be used to specify visual appearance of document
- can be expressed in XML (and thus generated by XSLT)
- you can imagine it as HTML that is oriented towards print output with more control over layout and appearance