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XSL Sites
- To: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
- Subject: [xsl] XSL Sites
- From: Matt Gushee <mgushee at havenrock dot com>
- Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 22:41:49 -0600 (MDT)
- References: <20010531010342.11897.qmail@nw128.netaddress.usa.net>
- Reply-To: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
Sheryl Garde writes:
> I'm just new to XSL/XML stuffs. Could someone help me
> better understand all about XSL/XML. Maybe you could
> give me a better site wherein i can be able to understand/
> study about XSL/XML.
You'll find some helpful online tutorials at www.zvon.org.
> One more thing, im quite confuse about this.
Yeah, lots of people are. It's inherently confusing.
> difference between XSL and XSLT/XPath/XSLFO? Maybe someone
> could clarify this for me..
IMHO it helps a lot if you know a bit of history:
"XSL" can refer to any of several things, but the original
concept was a platform- and media-independent formatting
language (eXtensible Stylesheet Language). Now, this original
W3C proposal had two parts. First was the formatting language per
se, which is a set of XML elements that describe parts of a page
in a very high-level way, e.g. "<block>," "<table>," etc. These
are the formatting objects.
The second part was a transformation language, which was intended
mainly (solely?) for converting an XML document into a "result
tree" consisting of XSL formatting objects. The original
developers envisioned a 2-stage process:
/-> output format A
XML Source -----\ /
>--> result tree -<---> output format B
XSL Stylesheet -/ \
\-> output format C
Well, along came big bad Microsoft and said "This is too
complicated. Most people just want to output HTML, and we can
do that with just the transformation part of XSL. No need for
all these formatting objects." So they went ahead and implemented
just the transformation language. At first they were criticized
for their partial implementation, but then the XML community
began to think that maybe this wasn't such a bad idea after all
(or perhaps nobody wanted to fight Microsoft).
And so XSL was split into two parts: XSLT and ... XSL. The
XSL spec defines the formatting objects, and so it is
informally known as XSLFO (or XSL-FO).
XSLT is the transformation language, which you can use to
transform an XML document into another XML document, into
HTML, or really into any type of text document. This is what
most people are using today.
So when people say "XSL", it can mean:
the W3C XSL spec, AKA XSL-FO;
the general process of transforming documents with XSLT +
XSL-FO; or, unfortunately:
XSLT (or the early version of it that Microsoft implemented)
I haven't mentioned XPath, but that's a good deal simpler.
XPath is a syntax for identifying nodes in an XML document
that you want to process in some way. XSLT depends on XPath,
but it is separate because several other W3C specs depend
on it too.
Hope this helps a bit.
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO, USA
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