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What is XSLT?
XSLT, which stands for eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, is a
language which can transform XML documents into any text-based format, XML or
otherwise. XSLT will allow anyone who have access to XML documents to
transform these documents into whatever other format they wish (a slightly
varied XML document for use with internal application, html for display on
their websites, pdf files, or regular text files). XSLT stylesheets are built
on structures called templates. A template is a sequence of instructions on
what to do with an XML document. A template is composed of two parts: 1) A
label that identifies the nodes in the XML document that the template will be
applied to. 2) Instructions about the actual transformation that will take
place. In order to get specific pieces of information from an XML document,
XSLT must use another expression language called XPATH. XPATH acts as a
sublanguage within an XSLT stylesheet. The most common use of XPATH is to
identify parts of the input document to be processed, but it may also be used
for numerical calculations, string manipulations, or testing boolean
expressions. With these tools and many others not mentioned, one can produce
very useful XSLT stylesheets.
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