The eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a family of Languages which allows one to describe how files encoded in the XML standard are to be formatted or transformed. There are three languages in the family:

These three specifications are available in the form of W3C Recommendations.

Within Microsoft, the term XSL is sometimes used to refer to a Microsoft variant of XSLT developed as an implementation of an early (1998) W3C draft of the XSLT language, with Microsoft-specific extensions and omissions. Other commentators generally refer to this dialect as WD-xsl. The dialect was later superseded by a conformant implementation of the W3C specification.

=History=

XSL started off as an attempt to bring the functionality of DSSSL, particularly in the area of print and high-end typeseting, to XML. A W3C Working group on XSL was started in December 1997, with Sharon Adler and Steve Zilles as co-chairs, with James Clark acting as editor (and unofficially as chief designer), and Chris Lilley (W3C) as W3C staff contact. The group released a first public Working Draft on 18 August 1998. XSLT and XPath became W3C Recommendations on 16 November 1999 and XSL reached Recommendation status on 15 October 2001.

=The XSL family=

==XSL Transformations==

There are currently many XSLT implementations available. Several web-browsers including Internet Explorer (using the MSXML engine), Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla and Netscape (web browser) (all using the TransforMiiX engine) support transformation of XML to HTML through XSLT. Other notable implementations are Saxon XSLT and Xalan.

==XSL Formatting Objects==

XSL Formatting Objects are less widely supported. Most (all) current implementations are only partial. FOP, from the Apache Software Foundation project, can render a large portion of the XSL formatting objects specification to Portable Document Format and other output formats. The PassiveTeX package is another implementation that uses TeX to convert the output of an XSL-FO stylesheet to PDF.

More file formats are supported to various degree.

==XPath==

XML Path Language (XPath) is used by XSLT to describe how to access parts of an XML document and is also considered to be part of the XSL family.

XML query language is another W3C project which is intended to provide similar capabilities for querying XML documents using XPath.

=See also=

*List of stylesheet languages *Comparison of stylesheet languages

=External links=