XSL Reference

Welcome to the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) reference documentation.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working draft for XSL divides the language into two main parts: transformation and formatting semantics. This release supports the transformation part of the W3C XSL specification.  Microsoft is tracking the W3C working draft and will be updating this implementation to match the final W3C recommendation.

XSL is defined as an XML grammar that consists of a set of XSL elements. You can use XSL to transform XML documents to HTML documents or to other XML documents.

You can use XSL for direct browsing of XML files and from the XML DOM.

The XML DOM transformNode method supports the use of XSL elements to perform transformations. The DOM selectNodes and selectSingleNode methods support the XSL pattern-matching syntax that enables sophisticated queries for nodes within a particular context of the overall tree structure. (C++ developers, click these links: transformNode, selectNodes and selectSingleNode.)

This documentation is divided into three sections:

• XSL Elements
• XSL Pattern-Matching Syntax
• XSL Methods

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