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.
--------------------------------------------------
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。