In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to refer to a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents.
Historically, the XSL Working Group in W3C produced a draft specification under the name XSL, which eventually split into three parts:
As a result, the term XSL is now used with a number of different meanings:
A style sheet language, or style language, is a computer language that expresses the presentation of structured documents. One attractive feature of structured documents is that the content can be reused in many contexts and presented in various ways. Different style sheets can be attached to the logical structure to produce different presentations.
One modern style sheet language with widespread use is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is used to style documents written in HTML, XHTML, SVG, XUL, and other markup languages.
For content in structured documents to be presented, a set of stylistic rules – describing, for example, colors, fonts and layout – must be applied. A collection of stylistic rules is called a style sheet. Style sheets in the form of written documents have a long history of use by editors and typographers to ensure consistency of presentation, spelling and punctuation. In electronic publishing, style sheet languages are mostly used in the context of visual presentation rather than spelling and punctuation.