What the crap is XSL?

[Da_iMac_Daddy]

OK how come I've hardly ever heard of it. I understand it's supposedly like CSS but that's pretty much all the information I could find about it (I have homework to do). Who "owns" XSL? Why would it be better than CSS?

Thanks in advance :P

[Dusky]

I dunno myself, but I'm sure someone will eventually link you to...

http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/WhatIsXSL.html

[Arden]

XSL is to XML as CSS is to HTML.

[Captain Code]

XSL is much more than CSS. It can allow you to take XML and display it as HTML in a browser, but you can do much more with it.

If you are a big business, you will use XSL in the form of XSLT(T for transformation) to change the format of your XML to a compatible format of another company.

With CSS, you start with HTML and tell the browser how to display the HTML.

With XSL/XSLT, you start with XML and transform it into a different format such as HTML, more XML, or text.

[Dris]

XSL is an XML language that takes an input XML document and turns it into another format. Sometimes it turns it into another XML document, but I've seen it used to generate PDF files and more.

Let's say you have an XML document with tags that list a bunch of recipes. You could use XSL to transform that document into and XHTML document that has a table of all your recipes.

That's not the most powerful example by any means. I was once using it to transform raw page content in XML into XHTML that was laid out how I needed it, which is something that CSS can't do by itself (yet).