Advantages
- XSL simplifies the merging of XML data into a presentation
- It’s more convenient to traverse an XML document (by using XPath), rather than the traditional way (by using scripting language)
- XSL is resilient to changes in documents because it’s template based
- It is very easy to change the output format without touching the code behind
- XSL can be used as a validation language
Disadvantages
- Performance suffers penalties because processing is memory intensive
- Complicated business rules are difficult to implement
- It requires recursions for changing the value of variables
- If the developer works with numerous templates, it may be difficult to figure out which templates are applied
- If small changes are not carefully made, they can have large repercussions, causing the execution to be very slow
Components
- XSLT
- XPath
- FO
Development tools
- XMLSpy
- StyleVision
- MapForce
