XML is a markup language which was initially considered by a group of programmers working for IBM back in the 1980’s, however back then it had been known as SGML, later as the digital era began it evolved into XML.
The goal of XML was to allow for documents and data to be transported over the internet and available, to do this and much more, programmers realised that much more functionality was needed.
What was required was the capacity to transform XML documents into different outputs like HTML, PDF etc, so that it could offer more functionality and flexibility than it could possibly deliver back then.
The programmers were acutely aware that applications which could work with XML would ultimately also need to display or structure that information or data in different formats that could not be specified in the XML document itself.
The thing that was called for was a answer that might accept the XML data and change it into other formats, like HTML as well as further developments into other forms of XML so that it may very well be applied to any platform or with any other programming language.
The builders developed a method called XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation), XSLT has been widely successful permitting non XML related technologies such as ASP, HTML and a lot more to work with XML language.
With the web getting increasingly mobile and cross device, it has enabled XML to be utilized by a wide range of devices across various platforms and browsers, and from mobiles, to laptops, to tablets to PC’s and more.
There's also additional benefits, by way of example with XSLT, you can now also transform the structure of XML documents, that is ideal when the data will not fit with the applications data structure requirement, with XSLT you simply transform the structure of the XML document to correspond with the requirement of the application.
So how does XSLT work what is the process for changing XML documents? Well you'll find two primary pieces, the first component is that you must parse your xml file, using a parsing engine.
Parsing is where the XML document is loaded into a tree structure. The second element is where the tree structure will be further optimised for XSLT processing and is influenced by the processor type, ie whether it’s a SAX or DOM processor.
It’s also important to observe that in order to process XML files, XSLT relies on templates so that it may make specific structures, on this matter, the W3C states;
A stylesheet contains a set of template rules. A template rule has two parts: a pattern which is matched against nodes in the source tree and a template which can be instantiated to form part of the result tree. This allows a stylesheet to be applicable to a wide class of documents that have similar source tree structures.
The benefit of making use of templates is the fact its adaptable and also efficient and also a excellent means of processing different XML structures. There certainly are a wide variety of free and commercial xml tools that can also process your xml files that also feature built-in SAX or DOM processors and can accomplish XSLT transformations.
