XSLT – Introduction

Extensible Style sheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is a language  helps in transforming the documents from one XML to another document of XML. The main purpose of this language is to convert  HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects,  PDF, PostScript and PNG.

The original documents will be 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. Therefore the original document is not changed, rather a new document is created on the content of existing one.

How Does it works?

1. An XSLT style sheet is used to define the transformation rules to be applied on the XML document.

2.It is written in XML format.

3.The Processor takes the XSLT style sheet and applies the transformation rules on the target XML document and then it generates a formatted document in the form of XML, HTML, or text format.

4.This formatted document is then utilized by XSLT formatter to generate the actual output which is to be displayed to the end-user.