XSLT, 2nd Edition

XSLT Standards

XSLT 1.0 is defined in two documents: the XSLT and XPath specifications. XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0, on the other hand, are defined in a set of eight documents. We’ll discuss all of those specifications briefly in the next section.

XSL transformations (XSLT) version 1.0

The original standard became a recommendation of the W3C on November 16, 1999. The spec lives here: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt.

XML path language (XPath) version 1.0

XPath 1.0 became a standard on the same day as XSLT 1.0. XPath began as part of XSLT. If we’re going to write a stylesheet to transform an XML document, we have to have a syntax for describing different parts of that document. As the development of XSLT continued, it became obvious that XPath was useful for a variety of applications, so XPath became a separate standard. You can find the definition of XPath 1.0 at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.

XSL transformations (XSLT) version 2.0

The basic definition of XSLT 2.0 is at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/. This document defines the elements of XSLT 2.0 and a variety of functions and also defines how XSLT 2.0 processes an XML document.

XML path language (XPath) version 2.0

The basic definition of XPath 2.0 is at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/. XPath 2.0 is built on top of several other documents; we’ll list those next.

XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model (XDM)

This spec defines the way XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 organize data. It defines the information contained in the input to an XSLT 2.0 or XQuery 1.0 ...