Before XSLT, first we should learn about XSL. XSL stands for EXtensible Stylesheet Language. It is a styling language for XML just like CSS is a styling language for HTML.
XSLT stands for XSL Transformation. It is used to transform XML documents into other formats (like transforming XML into HTML).
What is XSL
In HTML documents, tags are predefined but in XML documents, tags are not predefined. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed XSL to understand and style an XML document, which can act as XML based Stylesheet Language.
An XSL document specifies how a browser should render an XML document.
Main parts of XSL Document
- XSLT: It is a language for transforming XML documents into various other types of documents.
- XPath: It is a language for navigating in XML documents.
- XQuery: It is a language for querying XML documents.
- XSL-FO: It is a language for formatting XML documents.
How XSLT Works
The XSLT stylesheet is written in XML format. It is used to define the transformation rules to be applied on the target XML document. The XSLT processor takes the XSLT stylesheet and applies the transformation rules on the target XML document and then it generates a formatted document in the form of XML, HTML, or text format. At the end it is used by XSLT formatter to generate the actual output and displayed on the end-user.
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Advantage of XSLT
A list of advantages of using XSLT:
- XSLT provides an easy way to merge XML data into presentation because it applies user defined transformations to an XML document and the output can be HTML, XML, or any other structured document.
- XSLT provides Xpath to locate elements/attribute within an XML document. So it is more convenient way to traverse an XML document rather than a traditional way, by using scripting language.
- XSLT is template based. So it is more resilient to changes in documents than low level DOM and SAX.
- By using XML and XSLT, the application UI script will look clean and will be easier to maintain.
- XSLT templates are based on XPath pattern which is very powerful in terms of performance to process the XML document.
- XSLT can be used as a validation language as it uses tree-pattern-matching approach.
- You can change the output simply modifying the transformations in XSL files.
