You may have heard those letters before, but what do they mean and how do they apply to your Web site? A great new article this month at A List Apart, Using XSLT to Transform XML, will walk you through it with a step-by-step tutorial, providing great explanations along the way.

Through collaborative and coordinated effort between W3C's XML Query Working Group and XSL Working Group, a collection of ten updated working draft specifications has been issued for public review and comment. and XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators are in Last Call WD status through June 30, 2003. XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0, and other specifications are dependent upon the data model, functions, and operators defined in these two WDs.

Open Source tool provider ActiveState has released an upgrade of its Visual XSLT IDE plug-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003 . The Visual XSLT 2.0 upgrade for the Visual Studio .NET IDE leverages some of .NET Framework's deepest code technologies, ActiveState technologists told OET to push the envelop for ease of use and debugging for XML/XSLT programming The result is an upgrade from Visual XSLT 1.0 that sports a just-in-time debugging, a programming-free visual schema mapper and improved project management.

So, you've got all kinds of XML data stored in databases and in the file system and you're anxious to get it on the Web. You're already familiar with XSLT transformations for making HTML out of XML, but is that all you can do with it?

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W3C has released an initial public working draft for Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.1, updating the W3C XSL Version 1.0 Recommendation published on October 15, 2001. This specification and a companion Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.1 Requirements document have been produced as part of the W3C XML Activity by the XSL Working Group.

Steve Ball (Zveno) has posted an announcement for the first release of an 'XSLT Standard Library' of commonly-used XSLT templates created through the corresponding SourceForge project. This initial release of the XSLT Standard Library is "to promote the library, establish the engineering standards for the library and also acts as a Call For Participation.

The primary objective of this project is to allow input, modification and maintenance of turnpoint databases by end-users using standard XML/XSL tools and technologies. It would provide a basis for future definition of a standard turnpoint database format and development of useful "freeware" tools to perform database management.

Contains an XSLT engine, which fully implements the XSLT standard

Unicorn Formatting Objects (UFO) - XSL-FO processor written in C++ for Windows systems Unofficial MSXML XSLT FAQ - A collection of helpful answers gathered by

The situation concerning XSL is going better. I is divided into two parts. It has a transformation language and an actual style language.

XSLT is designed for use as part of XSL, which is a stylesheet language for XML. In addition to XSLT, XSL includes an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting.

eXtensible Stylesheet Transformations Language (XSLT) evolved from the XSL standard. XSLT is a data transformation language for XML data.

XSLT (a comparatively easy transformation language) and XPath (its companion specification for identifying parts of XML documents) make XML powerful and flexible.

XSLT Resources

XML and XSL overview

XSL Resources

XSL Pointers

Whilst drinking my usual latte at the local Barnes and Noble, I read this article on the new facilities in XSLT 2.0. What immediately caught my attention was the inclusion of regular expressions facilities, as I had implemented something similar with XdtTransform. I was not aware of these changes in XSLT 2.0 when I initially derived the (extremely simple) grammar for XDT, so I'm going to refactor my thinking a bit and see if I can't unify some of the ideas.

Introducing XSLT and XPath. The XML Stylesheet Language (XSL) has three major subcomponents: XSL-FO. The "flow object" standard. XPath.