What's the difference between XSLT and XSL-FO?
What's the difference between XSLT and XSL-FO ?
Every resource I've read deal with them as if they were 1, or at least very closely tied..
Answer
I was wondering about the basis of the question because I thought it was easy to answer, however as soon as you go here: http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/ it becomes clear that its actually a good question - because pretty much the first thing on the page is this statement:
This specification defines the features and syntax for the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), a language for expressing stylesheets. It consists of two parts:
- a language for transforming XML documents (XSLT), and
- an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics.
However, back in the real world, XSLT (which is also what most people will assume you mean by XSL) is a means for transforming XML documents into something else - that something else more often than not being another well structured document probably also formatted as XML (though I've used XSLT to render XML to csv and plain(ish) text).
XSL-FO on the other hand is about formatting - about laying out content on a page or a sequence of pages in a fairly strict fashion. Its useful because it allows you to manage content that is spread across multiple pages, its relatively straightforward to specify the format of a page (or even and odd pages) including headers, footers, borders, columns, etc and have your content flow into that. One would therefore take a load of data in, say, an XML format and then use XSLT to convert that data into a document consisting of XSL-FO that in turn is rendered using an appropriate tool in say PDF for print or other means of distribution.
The use case I have is to take a pile of tabular data, export that data as XML, render that into XSL-FO and from there to PDF which goes to a printer who turns said PDF into a 500 page directory. One specifies in the XSL-FO that one wants page numbers, page breaks in specific circumstances, that there is a table of contents and an index (each based on particular elements) and the rendering process (to PDF) handles filling in the page numbers across the board.
Hopefully you're a bit less confused now..