XSL stands for EXtensible Stylesheet Language, and is a style sheet language for XML documents.
XSLT stands for XSL Transformations. XSLT used to transform XML documents into other formats, like XHTML or other XML documents.
CSS = Style Sheets for HTML
XSL = Style Sheets for XML
XSL describes how the XML document should be displayed!
XSL - More Than a Style Sheet Language
XSL consists of three parts:
- XSLT - a language for transforming XML documents
- XPath - a language for navigating in XML documents
- XSL-FO - a language for formatting XML documents
XSLT = XSL Transformations
XSLT is the most important part of XSL.
XSLT is used to transform an XML document into another XML document, or another type of document that is recognized by a browser, like HTML and XHTML. Normally XSLT does this by transforming each XML element into an (X)HTML element.
With XSLT you can add/remove elements and attributes to or from the output file. You can also rearrange and sort elements, perform tests and make decisions about which elements to hide and display, and a lot more.
A common way to describe the transformation process is to say that XSLT transforms an XML source-tree into an XML result-tree.
XPath, XPointer, XQuery --> Internally used by XSL
