Once again I got an email from my online XML course. This week there were two topics covered – XSL and XSLT. Unfortunately the coverage of XSLT was very light. I think I have written about XSLT with a little more depth before. If not, it might be time for a little more study and a future post. This week starts with an understanding the XML itself is not concerned with display. That’s where XSL comes in.XSL stands for eXtensible Stylesheet Language. This language contains formatting information for XML. The really interesting part is that XSL stylesheets are XML documents themselves. XSL was one of the first applications written in XML.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) define how XML looks in a web browser. They can also be applied to HMTL source as well. Finally the eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations (XSLT) is a language which transforms XML into other formats. Any example would be to transforms XML to HTML. However you can choose other outputs formats, including XML itself.
The heart of XSLT is the use of templates. Now that I look back on my blog posts, I find that I did not cover XSLT in depth anywhere yet. I did see that I wrote myself a note about there being a follow on class to the hands on training I took previously. Maybe that will be a good candidate for me to take next year. Then I will be able to write at length about this complex topic. Until then be well.
