In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to refer to a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents.
Historically, the XSL Working Group in W3C produced a draft specification under the name XSL, which eventually split into three parts:
As a result, the term XSL is now used with a number of different meanings:
This article is concerned with the various usages of the term XSL: for details of the various languages embraced by the term, see the relevant article.
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XSL began as an attempt to bring the functionality of DSSSL, particularly in the area of print and high-end typesetting, to XML.
In response to a submission from Arbortext, Inso, and Microsoft,[1] a W3C working group on XSL started operating 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 as the 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-FO reached Recommendation status on 15 October 2001.
Microsoft's MSXML, first released in March 1999, contained an incomplete implementation of the December 1998 transformation language published in the W3C XSL Working Draft. Microsoft documentation used the term "XSL" to refer to this language as implemented in MSXML, including MSXML-specific extensions and omissions. Subsequently, when MSXML was updated to support the final W3C XSLT 1.0 Recommendation, Microsoft documentation referred to the obsolete dialect as "XSL" and to the new language as "XSLT". Other commentators follow the lead of Michael Kay[2] in referring to the older language as WD-xsl. Current versions of MSXML (as of 2009) continue to support the obsolete dialect, but no longer mention it in the documentation.
Since the mid-2000 release of MSXML 3.0, MSXML has had complete support for both XSLT 1.0 alongside the older dialect. MSXML 3.0 became the default XML services library of Internet Explorer (IE) upon the release of IE 6.0 in August 2001. Older versions of IE could use MSXML 3.0 only with a custom install in "replace mode".
XSL Transformations (XSLT) currently[update] has many implementations available. Several web browsers, including Internet Explorer (using the MSXML engine), Opera (native engine) and Safari, all support transformation of XML to HTML (or other languages) through XSLT. Other notable implementations include Saxon and Xalan.
Support in Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape (all using the TransforMiiX engine) is incomplete. Support of disable-output-escaping does not work which is why HTML Fragments are not rendered properly. This bug is known since 2001 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98168 .
Support for XSL Formatting Objects is available in a number of products:
These products support output in a number of file formats, to varying degrees:
XML Path Language (XPath), itself part of the XSL family, functions within XSLT as a means of navigating an XML document.
Another W3C project, XQuery, aims to provide similar capabilities for querying XML documents using XPath.
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