XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations)

Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is an XML-based language used for the transformation of XML documents into other XML or "human-readable" documents. The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. The new document may be serialized (output) by the processor in standard XML syntax or in another format, such as HTML or plain text. XSLT is most often used to convert data between different XML schemas or to convert XML data into HTML or XHTML documents for web pages, creating a dynamic web page, or into an XSL-FO format that will be formatted to PDF, PostScript, PCL or AFP documents.

As a language, XSLT is influenced by functional languages, and by text-based pattern matching languages like SNOBOL and awk. Its most direct predecessor was DSSSL, a language that performed the same function for SGML that XSLT performs for XML. XSLT can also be considered as a template processor.

DocFamily makes an extensive use of XSLT. All document templates are implemented (by DocDesign) as XSLTs. In DocBase or DocWrite Servers, XML data and XSLTs are transformed to XSL-FO or to XFORMS.