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).

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

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>

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