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Re: Why is there an "S" in XSLT?

• From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@r...>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>
• Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 08:49:01 -0400

Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> The "S" in XSLT stands for "stylesheet."  But in modern web design
> practices styling a document (i.e., adding text color, font-size,
> borders, and so forth) is accomplished using Cascading Stylesheets
> (CSS).  
>   

Since the obvious answer hasn't been mentioned in this thread, I guess 
I'll provide it ;->

The stylesheet language is XSL, which is routinely used to translate XML 
into PDF, PostScript, and other formats. When formatting documents, you 
often need to do transformations. The transformation language designed 
to support XSL stylesheets was called XSL Transformation Language.

XSLT can be used quite generally, but there are certainly aspects of its 
design that were motivated by use cases expected for this kind of 
transformation. And this has affected XPath and XQuery - because of the 
use cases envisioned for stylesheet-oriented transformations, E1/E2 
involves implicitly removing duplicates and sorting in document order.

Retaining "S" in the name can help explain the history, design choices 
and quirks of the language. I think that's a good thing. XSLT is 
certainly used more widely than for stylesheets, and the designers of 
the language were very aware that it probably would be, but stylesheets 
were veyr much on their minds and influenced the language significantly.

Jonathan

• References:
  • Why is there an "S" in XSLT?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>