XSL was developed initially as a specification for defining how an XML document is to be displayed. Over the course of it’s evolution, it split into three components: XSL Transformation ( XSLT ), XSL Formatting Objects ( XFO ), and the XML Path ( XPath ). XPath, unlike XSLT and XFO, does not have an XML syntax; it is used to specify parts of an XML document.
Much like CSS3 modules, the different components of XSL can have different a status and version, although XPath and XSLT usually have the same version because they are developed in tandem . Support for XSL technologies varies with browsers and applications, but overall browsers have good support for XSL, for quite a long time; Internet Explorer 5 supported the XSLT1.0 draft specification since 1999, although the final recommendation was different from the draft.
Currently, all major browsers fully implement the XSLT1.0 specification. However, even though XSLT 2.0 reached the W3C Recommendation status in 2007, support for it remains rare in browsers, and XSLT 1.0 remains in widespread usage.
