What is XSLT? (译）

What is XSLT?

Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) has evolved from the early Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) standard. XSL specifies a language definition for XML data presentation and data transformations. Data presentation means displaying data in some format and/or medium. Presentation is about style. Data transformation means parsing an input XML document into a tree of nodes, and then converting the source tree into a result tree. Transformation is about data exchange.

Because these functionalities serve two distinct purposes, XSLT was proposed and later accepted as a separate standard for XML data transformation only. XSL is now generally referred to as XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), to distinguish it from XSLT. The future of XSL-FO as a standard is uncertain, because much of its functionality overlaps with that provided by cascading style sheets (CSS) and the HTML tag set. If cross-vendor compatibility is important, you might want to avoid XSL-FO until it becomes a standard fully accepted by the Worldwide Web Consortium.

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翻译：

什么是XSLT？

扩展样式表语言转换（XSLT）由早期的扩展样式表语言（XSL）标准进化而来。XSL为XML数据表现和转换指定一种语义。数据表现意味着要将数据显示成某些格式及（或）某些媒体上，是关于样式上的表现。数据转换则意味着将输入的XML文档解析为一棵树，并将源树转换为目标树，是关于数据上的变换。

因为这些功能服务着两个截然不同的目的，于是XSLT被提出并在之后被接受成为一种区别的标准，仅仅作为XML数据转换之用。而现在，一般只在作为XSL格式化对象（XSL-FO）时才被提到，以区别于XSLT。XSL-FO在未来能否会成为标准，那是无法确定，因为它的许多功能与层叠式样式表（CSS）及HTML标签集重叠。如果跨供应商兼容性很重要，你应该在XSL-FO完全成为W3C标准前避免使用它。