XSL is a language for expressing style sheets. An XSL style sheet is, like with CSS, a file that describes how to display an XML document of a given type. XSL shares the functionality and is compatible with CSS2 (although it uses a different syntax). It also adds:
Styling requires a source XML documents, containing the information that the style sheet will display and the style sheet itself, which describes how to display a document of a given type.
<?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="helloworldXSL.xsl"?> <prompt> <greeting>Hello World</greeting> </prompt>
XSL style sheet with instruction to transform, and format, to HTML.
<?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"> <xsl:template match= "/"> <html> <body> <xsl:for-each select="prompt"> <div align="center"> <h1> <xsl:value-of select="greeting" /> </h1> </div> </xsl:for-each> </body> </html> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>
HTML output produced by Parser.
<html> <body> <div align="center"> <h1>Hello World</h1> </div> </body> </html>