XSL

In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to refer to a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents (e.g., XSL is used to determine how to display a XML document as a webpage[1]).

In response to a submission from Arbortext, Inso, and Microsoft,[2] a W3C working group on XSL started operating in December 1997, with Sharon Adler and Steve Zilles as co-chairs, with James Clark acting as editor (and unofficially as chief designer), and Chris Lilley as the W3C staff contact.

These products all have a high level of conformance to the specification, though they also offer proprietary vendor extensions, and some of them omit support for optional features such as disable-output-escaping.

Support for XSL Formatting Objects is available in a number of products: These products support output in a number of file formats, to varying degrees: XML Path Language (XPath), itself part of the XSL family, functions within XSLT as a means of navigating an XML document.

Another W3C project, XQuery, aims to provide similar capabilities for querying XML documents using XPath.