The original XSL Note (now obsolete) entitled
A Proposal for XSL was submitted
to the W3C by authors from Microsoft Corporation, Inso Corporation,
ArborText, University of Edinburgh, and James Clark in August 1997. At that time, XSL stood
for "Extensible Style Language". This Note eventually became a significantly
altered W3C Working Draft in August 1998
(renamed "Extensible Stylesheet Language"),
with a second draft in December 1998, and a
third draft in April 1999
(in which the XSL Transformations (XSLT) part was moved into a separate document).
[Prior to the April 1999 split into XSL and XSLT,
Paul Prescod announced to the XSL-List a proposal for the creation of a
W3C-recommended transformation language.]
Radical changes in syntax beginning with the August 1998 Working Draft mean that early XSL
implementations and references are fundamentally incorrect in most details.
XPath was split from XSLT in July 1999 (see below).
The W3C XSL Working Group predicted in March 1998 that XSL will become a Proposed Recommendation around
May 1999. XSLT and XPath (below) became Proposed Recommendations
in October 1999, but the main XSL spec (covering formatting objects)
is still a working draft.
What is XSLT?
The April 1999 XSL Working Draft
split into two pieces, the main document and
XSL Transformations (XSLT).
To quote from the XSLT Working Draft:
"XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents.
XSLT is designed for use as part of XSL, which is a stylesheet language for XML. In addition
to XSLT, XSL includes an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting. XSL specifies the styling
of an XML document by using XSLT to describe how the document is transformed into
another XML document that uses the formatting vocabulary.
XSLT is also designed to be used independently of XSL. However, XSLT is not intended as
a completely general-purpose XML transformation language. Rather it is designed primarily
for the kinds of transformation that are needed when XSLT is used as part of XSL."
What is XPath?
On July 9, 1999,
a portion of the XSLT Working Draft was removed and a third XSL spec was created:
XPath, the XML Path Language.
"XPath is the result of an effort to provide a common syntax and semantics for
functionality shared between XSL Transformations [XSLT] and XPointer
[XPointer]. The primary purpose of XPath is to address parts of an XML [XML]
document. In support of this primary purpose, it also provides basic facilities for
manipulation of strings, numbers and booleans. XPath uses a compact, non-XML
syntax to facilitate use of XPath within URIs and XML attribute values. XPath
operates on the abstract, logical structure of an XML document, rather than its
surface syntax; it models an XML document as a tree of nodes...."
Submit additions or corrections to Ken Sall
for consideration.
