The XSLT Standard Library, xsltsl, provides the XSLT developer with a set of XSLT templates for commonly used functions. These are implemented purely in XSLT, that is they do not use any extensions.

Altova® XMLSpy® includes a powerful XSLT 1.0/2.0 debugger for troubleshooting and perfecting XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 stylesheets. Testing and perfecting XSLT stylesheets can be a complicated, time-consuming process. With the XMLSpy XSLT debugger, you can step through and debug even the most intricate stylesheets quickly and easily. XMLSpy includes a complete implementation of the powerful new XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 specifications, and the XSLT debugger allows you to debug both XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 stylesheets.

To facilitate quick, error-free XSLT development, Altova® XMLSpy® includes full support for XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 editing, visual transformation, debugging, and profiling. Helpful features include context-sensitive entry helpers, an XPath 1.0 / 2.0 builder and analyzer, a powerful XSLT debugger that helps you test and perfect your code line-by-line, and an XSLT 2.0 profiler that delivers detailed metrics to help you eliminate bottlenecks and optimize your XSLT code quickly and easily.

With its unique approach to XSLT stylesheet development, Altova® StyleVision® abstracts away the underlying XSL syntax, allowing you to create XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 stylesheets visually, using drag-and-drop functionality, which takes considerably less time and reduces the occurrence of errors. In StyleVision, you create one graphical design that simultaneously produces standards-conformant XSLT 1.0/2.0 and XSL:FO stylesheets for transforming XML or database data into HTML as well as Word/RTF, and PDF formats. You can view and save the standards-based XSLT stylesheets at any time during the design process.

With XSL Editor you can easily create, edit, test and validate XSLT documents. The content assistant will provide the elements, attributes and attribute values specific for XSL and additionally the elements from the target document. Transformations can be configured to run the XSL you are creating.

Check out dotXSL, free XSLT designer tool for turning XML into web pages (XML2HTML). dotXSL is freeware, so you can use it for any purpose. dotXSL features WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop, ease of use, multi-tabbed professional developer's interface, modern look and feel, tons of advanced features, XSL/Xpath/CSS programming etc. dotXSL is great for XML reports, pages and sites. It also has XSL component feature, which is the ability to build XSL code that will work with virtually any XML, not just the XML it was designed to work. This is achieved by creating XML2XML mapping before XML is actually fed to XSL code. For instance, web menu can be created with many different XML structures - wouldn't be nice to create XSL component that will render it - and then use this XSL code with any XML? dotXSL supports all popular XSLT processors (MSXML, Saxon, Xalan, libxslt with PHP etc.). It also has publish feature for easy upload to web site, as well as live XML publishing feature to PHP (for example if you want to add live RSS to your web site). There are too many features to mention here, but entire Help System is on the web site so you can see for yourself. All of this is neatly explained in Flash Videos you can play on web site and get started in minutes - all FREE!

Several online video demonstrations covering: Converting Static HTML using XSLT, Using XSLT Templates, Working with Tables in XSLT, and other XSLT development topics. (Windows Media Player required).

Getting Started with XSLT covers the following topics: Understanding how templates work, working with XSLT stylesheets, Creating XSLT Stylesheets that generate HTML, specifying extension functions in XSLT Stylesheets, working with XSLT templates, Using an external XSLT Processor, postprocessing XML result documents, generating XSL Formatting pbjects, Generating Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and finally, an XSLT instructions quick reference guide.

By: Dr. Michael Kay. For programmers who want to learn how to use the XSLT language for developing web applications. The book is in four parts: a detailed introduction to the concepts of the language, a reference section giving comprehensive specifications and working examples of every feature, a development guide giving design advice and case studies for the advanced user, and a product reference detailing the features and usage of the latest versions of Microsoft MSXML, Apache Xalan, Oracle XML, open source Saxon, the TRAX API and other processors and tools. Download Chapter 1: "XSLT in Context" for free in a printable PDF format.

A public developer forum (message board) for XSLT help and discussion.

The W3C XSL Working Group has published the second working draft of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.1. Despite the more generic name, this actually only covers XSL Formatting Objects, not XSL Transformations.

According to a new analysis report from InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) XSLT 2.0 (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) specification demonstrates the tangible benefits of a corporate and IT investment in XML (Extensible Markup Language). Titled "A Focus on XSLT 2.0: Understanding the Development and Business Benefits," the report discusses XSLT 2.0's ability to substantially reduce code complexity and streamline development while simultaneously allowing developers to increase the capabilities of XML transformations.

I was talking with George Feil the other day and he said something I thought was very interesting. "You know," he said, "when you're dealing with Enterprise Apps, there's no reason to generate HTML on the server. You should generate XML, and then use XSLT or CSS in the browser, right? Surely browsers are close enough to standards, anbd far enough along that, at this point, if you insist on a recent browser, it should work."

A new e-Government schema has been developed as part of the Planning and Regulatory Services Online (PARSOL) Project and has been designed to provide a standard for planning application monitoring data (used to monitor land use against local and national plans and policies).

I am not sure how I missed this, but CambridgeDocs, makers of a product for aggregating content and managing its publication through a variety of channels, released a WordML/XSL-FO converter that makes Word 2003 documents more easily consumable for their system (see http://www.cambridgedocs.com/pr_06_22_2004.htm for more info). I thought this quote from their press release was key:

XSL (Extended Style Sheet Language) is used to define the layout of XML documents in a presentation medium such as a web browser window or a printed page. XSL includes the transformation language XSLT, which converts XML into formats such as HTML, PDF and Braille, or into other XML formats such as typesetting languages.

XSLT is extremly powerful but limited in many important ways. For example, it lacks basic date handling functions. I recently ran into this problem when I was trying to format an RSS feed for my home page. Luckily, eXSLT solves many of these problems. Even better, there is a .NET implementation on GotDotNet Workspaces.

Perhaps some tricky implementation of XSLT could figure out if a stylesheet is streamable and switch to a streaming strategy.

This is not really a new trick, I must say up-front. In order to have intellisense on XSLT documents you must copy this XSLT schema file into the folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\Packages\schemas\xml. Restart the IDE and you're done. Enjoy!

One questions that I am getting more frequently is “Will the next release of System.Xml V2.0 support XSLT 2.0?”. The answer is "No". It's not that we do not love XSLT (see [1] and [2] below), in fact it has proven itself to be both a powerful and adaptable language, but a challenger has risen in the form of XQuery.