The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released two specifications, XSL Transformations (XSLT) and XML Path Language (XPath), as W3C Recommendations. These new specifications represent cross-industry and expert community agreement on technologies that will enable the transformation and styled presentation of XML documents. A W3C Recommendation indicates that a specification is stable, contributes to Web interoperability, and has been reviewed by the W3C membership, who favor its adoption by the industry. As more content publishers and commercial interests deliver rich data in XML, the need for presentation technology increases in both scale and functionality. XSL meets the more complex, structural formatting demands that XML document authors have. XSLT makes it possible for one XML document to be transformed into another according to an XSL Style sheet. As part of the document transformation, XSLT uses XPath to address parts of an XML document that an author wishes to transform. XPath is also used by another XML technology, XPointer, to specify locations in an XML document. Together, XSLT and XPath make it possible for XML documents to be reformatted according to the parameters of XSL style sheets and increase presentation flexibility into the XML architecture. The XSLT Recommendation was written and developed by the XSL Working Group, which includes key industry players such as Adobe Systems, Arbortext, Bell Labs, Bitstream, Datalogics, Enigma, IBM, Interleaf, Lotus, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, O’Reilly & Associates, RivCom, SoftQuad Inc, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems. Notable contributions also came from the University of Edinburgh and a range of invited experts. The XPath Recommendation pooled together efforts from both the XSL Working Group and the XML Linking Working Group, whose membership includes CommerceOne, CWI, DATAFUSION, Fujitsu, GMD, IBM, Immediate Digital, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Textuality, and the University of Southampton. www.w3.org
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