Most of the descriptions are taken from the Wikipedia free encyclopedia.

XSLT is the abbreviation for Extended Stylesheet Lanugage Transformations. It is one of two parts of the XSL specifiation and is a language for transforming XML documents (actually the transformation part, T stands for transformation).

XSLT is a programming language, which transforms documents in XML format. To transform in this context means to take all data or part of it (Query of a selection with XPath) and create another XML document or a document in a format which can directly be used for displaying or printing (e.g. an HTML, RTF or TeX document). In particular the transformations involve:

• adding constant text like HTML document type and header information
• moving text
• sorting text

An XML document is a tree on which the transformations are applied. The language is declarative, i.e. a program consist of a collection of several rules which transformations should be performed. The rules are applied recursively.