XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) is a styling language for XML.
XSLT stands for XSL Transformations and it is used to transform XML data from one format to another.
The advantages of using XSLT are:
- XSLT provides an easy way to merge XML data into your presentation because it applies user-defined transformations to an XML document and the output can be HTML, XML or any other structured document.
- XSLT provides XPath to locate elements/attributes within an XML document. So it is a more convenient way to traverse an XML document than a traditional way, using a scripting language.
- XSLT is template based. So it is more resilient to changes in documents than low level DOM and SAX.
- XSLT can be used as a validation language as it uses tree-pattern-matching approach.
- You can change the output simply modifying the transformations in XSL files.