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In computer science, XSLT is the abbreviation for
Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations. It is one of two parts of the XSL
specification and is a language for transforming XML documents (actually the
transformation part, T stands for transformation). The other half of the XSL specification being
XSLF (where F stands for Formatting Objects.
Alternatively referred to as XSL-FO, or
XSLFO).
XSLT is a XML transformation language,
which transforms documents in XML format. To transform in this context means to take all data
or part of it (Query of a selection with XPath) and create another XML document or a
document in a format which can directly be used for displaying or printing (e.g. an HTML,
RTF or TeX document). In particular the transformations
involve:
- adding constant text like HTML document type and header information
- moving text
- sorting text
An XML document is a tree on which the transformations are applied. The language is declarative, i.e. a program consist of a
collection of several rules which transformations should be performed. The rules are applied recursively.
The XSLT processor checks which rules can be applied and executes the associated transformations based on a sequence of
priorities.
You can use XSLT in combination with CSS to produce
HTML documents.
An XSLT program is an XML document as the following template shows
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
...
</xsl:stylesheet>
STX is intended as a high-speed, low memory consumption alternative to XSLT.
Example
This example is taken from [1] .
Example: A function calculating factorial as an example of XSLT recursion.
<xsl:function name="eg:fact">
<xsl:param name="n"/>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="$n = 1 or $n = 0">
<xsl:value-of select="1"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select="$n * eg:fact($n - 1)"/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:function>
External links
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