What Is XSL?: XSL Extensible Stylesheet Language

What is XSL?
 XSL stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language

 CSS was designed for styling HTML pages, and can be used to
style XML pages
 XSL was designed specifically to style XML pages, and is
much more sophisticated than CSS
 XSL consists of three languages:
 XSLT (XSL Transformations) is a language used to transform XML
documents into other kinds of documents (most commonly HTML, so
they can be displayed)
 XPath is a language to select parts of an XML document to transform
with XSLT
 XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) is a replacement for CSS
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How does it work?
 The XML source document is parsed into an XML
source tree
 You use XPath to define templates that match parts of
the source tree
 You use XSLT to transform the matched part and put
the transformed information into the result tree
 The result tree is output as a result document
 Parts of the source document that are not matched by a
template are typically copied unchanged
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Simple XPath
 Here’s a simple XML document:  XPath expressions look
<?xml version="1.0"?> a lot like paths in a
<library> computer file system
<book>
<title>XML</title>
 / means the document
<author>Gregory Brill</author> itself (but no specific
</book> elements)
<book>  /library selects the root
<title>Java and XML</title> element
<author>Brett McLaughlin</author>  /library/book selects
</book> every book element
</library >  //author selects every
author element,
wherever it occurs
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Simple XSLT
 <xsl:for-each select="//book"> loops through every
book element, everywhere in the document
 <xsl:value-of select="title"/> chooses the content of

the title element at the current location
 <xsl:for-each select="//book">
<xsl:value-of select="title"/>
</xsl:for-each>
chooses the content of the title element for each book
in the XML document
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Using XSL to create HTML
 Our goal is to turn this:  Into HTML that displays
<?xml version="1.0"?> something like this:
<library>
<book> Book Titles:
<title>XML</title>
<author>Gregory Brill</author>
• XML
</book> • Java and XML
<book> Book Authors:
<title>Java and XML</title> • Gregory Brill
<author>Brett McLaughlin</author> • Brett McLaughlin
</book>
</library >
 Note that we’ve grouped
titles and authors
separately
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What we need to do
 We need to save our XML into a file (let’s call it
books.xml)
 We need to create a file (say, books.xsl) that describes
how to select elements from books.xml and embed
them into an HTML page
 We do this by intermixing the HTML and the XSL in the
books.xsl file
 We need to add a line to our books.xml file to tell it to
refer to books.xsl for formatting information
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books.xml, revised
 <?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="books.xsl"?>
<library>
<book>
<title>XML</title> This tells you where
<author>Gregory Brill</author> to find the XSL file
</book>
<book>
<title>Java and XML</title>
<author>Brett McLaughlin</author>
</book>
</library >
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Desired HTML
<html>
<head>
<title>Book Titles and Authors</title>
</head>
<body> Blue text is data extracted
<h2>Book titles:</h2> from the XML document
<ul>
<li>XML</li>
<li>Java and XML</li> Brown text is our
</ul>
<h2>Book authors:</h2> HTML template
<ul>
<li>Gregory Brill</li>
<li>Brett McLaughlin</li> We don’t necessarily
</ul> know how much data
</body>
</html> we will have
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XSL outline
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
<html> ... </html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
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Selecting titles and authors
<h2>Book titles:</h2>
<ul>
<xsl:for-each select="//book">
<li> Notice the
<xsl:value-of select="title"/> xsl:for-each
</li> loop
</xsl:for-each>
</ul>
<h2>Book authors:</h2>
...same thing, replacing title with author
 Notice that XSL can rearrange the data; the HTML result
can present information in a different order than the XML
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All of books.xml
 <?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="books.xsl"?>
<library>
<book>
<title>XML</title>
<author>Gregory Brill</author>
</book>
<book>
<title>Java and XML</title>
<author>Brett McLaughlin</author>
</book>
</library > Note: if you do View Source,
this is what you will see, not the
resultant HTML
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All of books.xsl
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <h2>Book authors:</h2>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" <ul>
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/
<xsl:for-each
XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/"> select="//book">
<html> <li>
<head> <xsl:value-of
<title>Book Titles and Authors</title> select="author"/>
</head> </li>
<body> </xsl:for-each>
<h2>Book titles:</h2>
<ul> </ul>
<xsl:for-each select="//book"> </body>
<li> </html>
<xsl:value-of select="title"/> </xsl:template>
</li> </xsl:stylesheet>
</xsl:for-each>
</ul>
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How to use it
 In a modern browser, such as Netscape 6, Internet
Explorer 6, or Mozilla 1.0, you can just open the
XML file
 Older browsers will ignore the XSL and just show you
the XML contents as continuous text
 You can use a program such as Xalan, MSXML,
or Saxon to create the HTML as a file
 This can be done on the server side, so that all the client
side browser sees is plain HTML
 The server can create the HTML dynamically from the
information currently in XML
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The result (in IE)
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The End
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What Is XSL?: XSL Extensible Stylesheet Language

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What Is XSL?: XSL Extensible Stylesheet Language

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What is XSL?

 XSL stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language

 <xsl:value-of select="title"/> chooses the content of

<html> ... </html>

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