Displaying XML with XSL

XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) is the preferred style sheet language of XML.

• XSL can be used, amongst other things, to display xml attractively
• XSL is a programming language and is far more sophisticated than CSS.
• It can transform xml documents into many forms of output, such as plain text, csv files and other xml documents.
• XSL files are themselves examples of xml documents
• XSL is to xml what sql is to database tables

One way to use XSL is to transform XML into HTML before it is displayed by the browser

An Xml/XSL Example In this example the XML file, wine1xml.xml, is transformed into html using the XSL style sheet, wine1.xsl.

When you view the source code you will see the xml file and none of the html markup used to display the file.

Here is an overview of the process.

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