The J2EE™ Tutorial Second Edition

Introducing XSL, XSLT and XPath

The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) has three major subcomponents:

XSL-FO

The Formatting Objects standard. By far the largest subcomponent, this standard gives mechanisms for describing font sizes, page layouts, and other aspects of object rendering. This subcomponent is not covered by JAXP, nor is it included in this tutorial.

XSLT

This is the transformation language, which lets you define a transformation from XML into some other format. For example, you might use XSLT to produce HTML or a different XML structure. You could even use it to produce plain text or to put the information in some other document format. (And as you'll see in Generating XML from an Arbitrary Data Structure [page 264], a clever application ...