XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) is the styling language to match XML. At the most basic level it allows the programmer to manipulate XML on a template model - XSL provides the template to fit XML data into for displaying on a web page. However, it is capable of much more than that, and allows programmers to selectively query, display and manipulate data, perform scripting-like operations on the XML document and transform it into pure HTML for use on browsers which don't support XML.

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XML enables you to create documents that describe their data. XSLT, eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, is yet another--declarative--language designed to transform an XML document into another XML (or other format) document. XSLT grew out of work on XLS. Before XSLT, each XML transformation required a bespoke program. XSLT provides general transformation solutions. It acts on the nodes of the tree structure created by SAX or DOM, not directly on the original document.

In XSLT Programmer's Reference, Kay covers the processing model, stylesheet structure, XSLT elements and expressions complete with explanations and example usage, patterns (for node matching) and provides a number of worked XSLT examples. XSLT is fairly new, which accounts for the academic feel of the text. It helps to know Kay wrote one of the first XLST applications. The book is bedevilled by uncertainties. For example, XSLT is part of XSL, which defines XML document formatting--and is still under development. Similarly, XPath, now a sub-language within XSLT used in stylesheets and capable of performing calculations and string manipulation is derived from XPointers, which defined links between parts of documents. Their late marriage has left some confusion in usage. Despite the inevitable confusion, the book succeeds in explaining what XLST is, how it works and how stylesheets are constructed and used. Check out the XSLT stylesheet, which calculates a knight's tour of the chessboard and outputs it as HTML.

It's unlikely programmers will work with raw XSLT for long, any more than they write raw HTML. Applications will handle much of the drudgery--a good thing because XSLT is verbose. Still, this is an important book for anyone working at the sharp end with XML. You'll need to know how this stuff is supposed to work despite ambiguities in the specifications. --Steve Patient

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