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{{short description|Language for transforming XML documents}}
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libxslt, Saxon XSLT>Saxon, Xalan| influenced by = DSSSL| influenced = | programming language = | platform = | operating system = | license = | www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/}}| wikibooks = }}XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents,WEB,www.w3.org/standards/xml/transformation, Transformation, 2012-09-19, 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.WEB,www.w3.org/TR/xslt#output, XML Output Method, 2012-09-19, Support for JSON and plain-text transformation was added in later updates to the XSLT 1.0 specification.{{As of|August 2022}}, the most recent stable version of the language is XSLT 3.0, which achieved Recommendation status in June 2017.XSLT 3.0 implementations support Java, .NET, C/C++, Python, PHP and NodeJS. An XSLT 3.0 Javascript library can also be hosted within the Web Browser. Modern web browsers also include native support for XSLT 1.0.WEB,www.w3.org/standards/xml/transformation#uses, What is XSLT Used For?, 2018-02-07, For an XSLT document transformation, the original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one.WEB,www.w3.org/TR/xslt#section-Introduction, Introduction, W3C, XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 W3C Recommendation, 16 November 1999, November 7, 2012, 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.While XSLT was originally designed as a special-purpose language for XML transformation, the language is Turing-complete, making it theoretically capable of arbitrary computations.XSLT Version 2.0 Is Turing-Complete: A Purely Transformation Based ProofHistoryXSLT is influenced by functional languages,WEB,www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslt/, Michael Kay, What kind of language is XSLT?, IBM, July 8, 2016, 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.WEB,www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-XSL.html, A Proposal for XSL, W3C, November 7, 2012,
- XSLT 1.0: XSLT was part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) development effort of 1998–1999, a project that also produced XSL-FO and XPath. Some members of the standards committee that developed XSLT, including James Clark, the editor, had previously worked on DSSSL. XSLT 1.0 was published as a W3C recommendation in November 1999.WEB,www.dblab.ntua.gr/~bikakis/XML%20and%20Semantic%20Web%20W3C%20Standards%20Timeline-History.pdf, XML and Semantic Web W3C Standards Timeline, 2012-02-04, 2013-04-24,www.dblab.ntua.gr/~bikakis/XML%20and%20Semantic%20Web%20W3C%20Standards%20Timeline-History.pdf," title="web.archive.org/web/20130424125723www.dblab.ntua.gr/~bikakis/XML%20and%20Semantic%20Web%20W3C%20Standards%20Timeline-History.pdf,">web.archive.org/web/20130424125723www.dblab.ntua.gr/~bikakis/XML%20and%20Semantic%20Web%20W3C%20Standards%20Timeline-History.pdf, dead, Despite its age, XSLT 1.0WEB,www.w3.org/TR/xslt, XSL Transformations (XSLT), W3.org, 1999-11-16, 2014-07-12, is still widely used ({{as of|2018|lc=y}}), since later versions are not supported natively in web browsers or for environments like LAMP.
- XSLT 2.0: after an abortive attempt to create a version 1.1 in 2001,WEB,www.w3.org/TR/xslt11/, XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.1, W3.org, 2001-08-24, 2014-07-12, the XSL working group joined forces with the XQuery working group to create XPath 2.0,WEB,www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/, XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0 (Second Edition), W3.org, 2010-12-14, 2014-07-12, with a richer data model and type system based on XML Schema. Building on this is XSLT 2.0,WEB,www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/, XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0, W3.org, 2007-01-23, 2014-07-12, developed under the editorship of Michael Kay, which reached recommendation status in January 2007.WEB,www.dblab.ntua.gr/~bikakis/XML%20and%20Semantic%20Web%20W3C%20Standards%20Timeline-History.pdf, XML and Semantic Web W3C Standards Timeline, 2012-02-04, 2012-02-04, 2013-04-24,www.dblab.ntua.gr/~bikakis/XML%20and%20Semantic%20Web%20W3C%20Standards%20Timeline-History.pdf," title="web.archive.org/web/20130424125723www.dblab.ntua.gr/~bikakis/XML%20and%20Semantic%20Web%20W3C%20Standards%20Timeline-History.pdf,">web.archive.org/web/20130424125723www.dblab.ntua.gr/~bikakis/XML%20and%20Semantic%20Web%20W3C%20Standards%20Timeline-History.pdf, dead, The most important innovations in XSLT 2.0 include:
- String manipulation using regular expressions
- Functions and operators for manipulating dates, times, and durations
- Multiple output documents
- Grouping (creating hierarchic structure from flat input sequences)
- A richer type system and stronger type checking
- XSLT 3.0: became a W3C Recommendation on 8 June 2017. The main new features are:WEB, What’s New in XSLT 3.0?
| publisher=w3, 6 January 2014,
- Streaming transformations: in previous versions the entire input document had to be read into memory before it could be processed,
WEB, Kay, Michael, A Streaming XSLT Processor,www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol5/html/Kay01/BalisageVol5-Kay01.html, Balisage: The Markup Conference 2010 Proceedings, 15 February 2012, and output could not be written until processing had finished. XSLT 3.0 allows XML streaming which is useful for processing documents too large to fit in memory or when transformations are chained in XML Pipelines.
- Packages, to improve the modularity of large stylesheets.
- Improved handling of dynamic errors with, for example, an xsl:try instruction.
- Support for maps and arrays, enabling XSLT to handle JSON as well as XML.
- Functions can now be arguments to other (higher-order) functions.
Design and processing modelright|thumb|Diagram of the basic elements and process flow of eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations.The XSLT processor takes one or more XML source documents, plus one or more XSLT stylesheets, and processes them to produce one or multiple output documents.{{Citation |last1=Flatt |first1=Amelie |title=Phase III: Generating Artifacts from the Model |date=2022 |url=https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-031-14132-4_5 |work=Model-Driven Development of Akoma Ntoso Application Profiles |pages=31–37 |place=Cham |publisher=Springer International Publishing |language=en |doi=10.1007/978-3-031-14132-4_5 |isbn=978-3-031-14131-7 |access-date=2023-01-07 |last2=Langner |first2=Arne |last3=Leps |first3=Olof}}WEB, XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0 (Second Edition),www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#creating-result-trees, 2023-02-07, www.w3.org, Example: Multiple Result Documents, In contrast to widely implemented imperative programming languages like C, XSLT is declarative.WEB, Discover the Wonders of XSLT: XSLT Quirks,www.developer.com/xml/article.php/3357231#Coding%20styles, XSLT is a very specialized language with a distinct declarative flavor., 2011-02-11, 2011-07-09,www.developer.com/xml/article.php/3357231#Coding%20styles," title="web.archive.org/web/20110709015528www.developer.com/xml/article.php/3357231#Coding%20styles,">web.archive.org/web/20110709015528www.developer.com/xml/article.php/3357231#Coding%20styles, dead, The basic processing paradigm is pattern matching.WEB, Kay, Michael, What kind of language is XSLT?,www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslt/, IBM, 13 November 2013, 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.A typical processor behaves as follows. First, assuming a stylesheet has already been read and prepared, the processor builds a source tree from the input XML document. It then processes the source tree’s root node, finds the best-matching template for that node in the stylesheet, and evaluates the template’s contents. Instructions in each template generally direct the processor to either create nodes in the result tree, or to process more nodes in the source tree in the same way as the root node. Finally the result tree is serialized as XML or HTML text.XPath{{details|XPath}}XSLT uses XPath to identify subsets of the source document tree and perform calculations. XPath also provides a range of functions, which XSLT itself further augments.XSLT 1.0 uses XPath 1.0, while XSLT 2.0 uses XPath 2.0. XSLT 3.0 will work with either XPath 3.0 or 3.1. In the case of 1.0 and 2.0, the XSLT and XPath specifications were published on the same date. With 3.0, however, they were no longer synchronized; XPath 3.0 became a Recommendation in April 2014, followed by XPath 3.1 in February 2017; XSLT 3.0 followed in June 2017.XQuery compared{{details|XQuery#XQuery and XSLT compared}}XSLT functionalities overlap with those of XQuery, which was initially conceived as a query language for large collections of XML documents.The XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 standards were developed by separate working groups within W3C, working together to ensure a common approach where appropriate. They share the same data model, type system, and function library, and both include XPath 2.0 as a sublanguage.The two languages, however, are rooted in different traditions and serve the needs of different communities. XSLT was primarily conceived as a stylesheet language whose primary goal was to render XML for the human reader on screen, on the web (as a web template language), or on paper. XQuery was primarily conceived as a database query language in the tradition of SQL.Because the two languages originate in different communities, XSLT is stronger in its handlingof narrative documents with more flexible structure, while XQuery is stronger in its data handling, for example when performing relational joins.WEB, Saxonica: XSLT and XQuery,www.saxonica.com/technology/xslt-and-xquery.xml, 2022-06-29, www.saxonica.com, Media typesThe |
