XSLT Developer's Guide

The MSXML Parser supports a subset of the XSL Transformations (XSLT) and XPath Version 1.0 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendations. In addition, MSXML maintains backward compatibility with the MSXML 2.0 and 2.5 implementations of Section 2 of the December 1998 XSL Working Draft of XSL. There is no support for XSL Formatting Objects. XSLT and XPath Conformance Notes detail unimplemented features and known conformance bugs.

Information about support for XSL can be obtained from the XML 2.5 SDK documentation. See the XML Developer Center for more information.

For information about the differences between XSL and XSLT, see XSL to XSLT Converter.

XSLT transformations address some common needs in XML:

• Enabling display: The XSLT transformation language enables display of XML by transforming XML into grammar and structure suitable for display—for instance, into HTML.
• Direct browsing of XML files: Internet Explorer 5 can apply style sheets that produce HTML, allowing direct browsing of the XML files.
• Content delivery to down-level browsers: XSLT transformations can be executed on the server to provide HTML documents for down-level browsers.
• Schema Translation: The transformation process is independent of any particular output grammar and can be used for translating XML data from one schema to another.
• Converting XML through querying, sorting, and filtering: The transformation can be used for general-purpose transformations within a single grammar, including filtering, sorting, and summarizing data.

The XSLT Developer's Guide covers these topics:

• XSLT and XPath Conformance Notes
• Getting Started with XSLT
• Browsing XML Documents in Internet Explorer 5
• Using the XSLT Processor
• XPath
• Advanced XSLT Features

See Also

XML and XSL Samples | XSLT Elements