XSLT
XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or into XSL Formatting Objects, which may subsequently be converted to other formats, such as PDF, PostScript and PNG.
The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. Typically, input documents are XML files, but anything from which the processor can build an XQuery and XPath Data Model can be used, for example relational database tables, or geographical information systems.
XSLT is a Turing-complete language, meaning it can specify any computation that can be performed by a computer.
History
XSLT is influenced by functional languages, and by text-based pattern matching languages like SNOBOL and awk. Its most direct predecessor is DSSSL, which did for SGML what XSLT does for XML.
XSLT 1.0: XSLT was part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) development effort of 1998–1999, a project that also produced XSL-FO and XPath. Some members of the standards committee that developed XSLT, including James Clark, the editor, had previously worked on DSSSL. XSLT 1.0 was published as a W3C recommendation in November 1999.