XML Development with Java™ 2

The XSL Language

Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is actually two languages in one (three if we include XPath!). First, XSL is a transformation language. XSL Transforms, more commonly called XSLT and using the xsl: namespace, defines how an XML Stylesheet is applied to an XML document to transform one XML document into another. The second thing that XSL provides is formatting. Formatting Objects, using the fo: namespace, define how a document is rendered or formatted for display and is normally the second step when applying a stylesheet. Finally, XSL is XPath. XPath is a rather recent addition to XML and is used in both XPointer and XSLT. As we shall see, XSLT extends XPath in certain useful ways. XPath is actually a rather simple expression ...