RE: terms confusing XSL and XSLT

[Kay Michael <Michael.Kay@xxxxxxx>]

> i'm lost between XSL and XSLT

Yes, it's very confusing.

First there was XSL, which was conceived as a language to do styling (i.e.
to define how an XML document should be rendered). Then XSLT was carved out
as a separate sub-language to do the first part of styling, which is
transformation. This was the first part to be implemented, so a lot of
people used XSL and XSLT as near synonyms. Microsoft implemented a very
early draft of XSLT, before it was called XSLT, so in Microsoft
documentation XSL now means "the Microsoft 1998 dialect of XSLT"; but in the
W3C standards world (and they invented the name) it means "a
yet-to-be-completed standard that includes separate components for XML
transformation and formatting".

Mike Kay


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