Preface

Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) and its companion, the XML Path Language (XPath), are arguably the two most widely used XML-related specifications to come out of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since XML 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml.html).

XSLT 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt) and XPath 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath) appeared as W3C recommendations in November 1999, about a year and a half after XML. While XSLT and XPath have detractors, they are generally well-accepted in the XML community. One reason why is that XSLT is a relatively easy-to-learn, declarative language. As a declarative language, XSLT relies on an underlying implementation in a programming language such as Java or C++ to get its work done. This book intends to get you doing useful work with XSLT the same day you start reading it.