Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations
| Paradigm | Declarative |
|---|---|
| Developer | W3C |
| First appeared | 1998 |
| Stable release |
2.0
|
| Preview release |
3.0
|
| Website | W3C Transformation |
| Major implementations | |
| libxslt, Saxon, Xalan | |
| Influenced by | |
| DSSSL | |
XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subsequently be converted to other formats, such as PDF, PostScript and PNG. XSLT 1.0 is widely supported in modern web browsers.
The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. Typically, input documents are XML files, but anything from which the processor can build an XQuery and XPath Data Model can be used, such as relational database tables or geographical information systems.
XSLT is a Turing-complete language, meaning it can specify any computation that can be performed by a computer.
XSLT is influenced by functional languages, and by text-based pattern matching languages like SNOBOL and AWK. Its most direct predecessor is DSSSL, which did for SGML what XSLT does for XML.
The XSLT processor takes one or more XML source documents, plus one or more XSLT stylesheets, and processes them to produce an output document. In contrast to widely implemented imperative programming languages like C, XSLT is declarative. The basic processing paradigm is pattern matching. Rather than listing an imperative sequence of actions to perform in a stateful environment, template rules only define how to handle a node matching a particular XPath-like pattern, if the processor should happen to encounter one, and the contents of the templates effectively comprise functional expressions that directly represent their evaluated form: the result tree, which is the basis of the processor's output.
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