The eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a family of languages which allows one to describe how files encoded in the XML standard are to be formatted or transformed. The family has three parts:

• XSL Transformations (XSLT): an XML language for transforming XML documents from one syntax to another
• XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO): an XML language for specifying the visual formatting of an XML document
• the XML Path Language (XPath): a non-XML language used by XSLT, and XLink, to access or refer to parts of an XML document.

These three specifications are the W3C Recommendations.

The XSL family

XSL Transformations

There are currently many XSLT implementations available. Several web-browsers including Internet Explorer (using the MSXML engine), Firefox, Mozilla and Netscape Navigator (all using the TransforMiiX engine) support transformation of XML to HTML through XSLT. Other notable implementations are Saxon and Xalan.

XSL Formatting Objects

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

XPath

XML Path Language (XPath) is used by XSLT to describe how to access parts of an XML document and is also considered to be part of the XSL family.

XQuery is another W3C project which is intended to provide similar capabilities for querying XML documents using XPath.

See also

• List of stylesheet languages
• Comparison of stylesheet languages

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