Processing

XSLT

Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations

Caution Formal standard W3C Since 1999

Judgement: Caution

XML transformation; maintain if you have it, don't pick it new.

Declarative, template-based language for transforming XML documents into other XML, HTML, or text. The processing counterpart to XML Schema — where XSD describes structure, XSLT rewrites it.

Implemented by Saxon, libxslt, and every major XML toolchain. Still load-bearing in publishing, government, banking, and healthcare integrations where XML pipelines never went away.

Example

A stylesheet is itself XML: templates match nodes, and the processor walks the tree applying them.

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="text"/>

  <xsl:template match="/orders">
    <xsl:for-each select="order">
      <xsl:value-of select="@id"/>,<xsl:value-of select="amount"/>
      <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

At a glance

Category
Processing
Governance
W3C
Status
Legacy; XSLT 3.0 (2017) is current, but new adoption is rare
First released
1999

Links

Related standards

Other standards in Processing.

See XSLT in context

Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare XSLT against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.