An XML transformation language is a computer language designed specifically to transform an input XML document into an output XML document which satisfies some specific goal.
There are two special cases of transformation:
XML to XML : the output document is an XML document.
XML to Data : the output document is a byte stream.
XML to XML
AnXML to XMLtransformation
An XML to XML transformation outputs XML document, it is current to chain XML to XML transformation to form XML pipelines
XML to Data
The XML to Data transformation contains some important cases. The most notable one is XML to HTML, as an HTML document is not an XML document.
XSLT is the best known XML transformation language. The XSLT 1.0 W3C recommendation was published in 1999 together with XPath 1.0, and it has been widely implemented since then. XSLT 2.0 is expected to be released soon as a W3C recommendation and early implementations of the specification like SAXON 8 (http://saxon.sourceforge.net/) are already available.
XQuery is also bound to become a W3C standard. XQuery is not an XML application, like XSLT. Consequently its syntax is much lighter. The language is based on XPath 2.0. XQuery programs cannot have side-effects, just like XSLT and provides almost the same capabilities (for instance: declaring variables and functions, iterating over sequences, using W3C schema types), even though the program syntax are quite different. In addition to the syntax, the main difference between XSLT and XQuery is the XSLT push processing model, where certain conditions of the input document trigger the execution of templates, which is not shared with XQuery.
STX (Streaming Transformations for XML) is inspired by XSLT but has been designed to allow a one-pass transformation process that never prevents streaming. Implementations are available in Java (Joost (http://joost.sourceforge.net/)) and Perl (XML::STX (http://stx.gingerall.cz/stx/xml-stx/index.html)).
An imperative scripting language inspired by Perl that uses the XML syntax. XML Script supports XPath as well as its proprietary DSLPath for selecting nodes from the input tree.
Applies techniques from XDuce to C#, see Xtatic homepage (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/xtatic/).
HaXml
A library and collection of tools to write XML transformations in Haskell. Its approach is very consistent and powerful. Also see this paper about HaXml published in 1999 (http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/HaXml/) and this IBM developerWorks article (http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-matters14.html).
The first is a transformationlanguage and the second is a formatting object vocabulary that should be implemented by all renderers.
The transformationlanguage could be stronger because conformance could be formally specified and tested in areas unrelated to stylesheet application.
XSL would essentially become the application of the transformationlanguage to input documents where the result is required to conform to a formatting object vocabulary.
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