NIST HOSTS XSL CONFORMANCE TESTING MEETING.

NIST hosted the first XSL Conformance Technical Committee meeting in June 2000, at NIST. XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) is a W3C recommendation (www.w3c.org/TR/XSL) for expressing stylesheets, which enables the transformation and formatting of XML data. Simply stated, XSL specifies the format into which XML data should be transformed (i.e., reformatted). Uses of XSL include transformation of XML into HTML for viewing in a browser or XML as input to another process (e.g., invoicing, accounts payable or receivable), database system, or device (e.g., WML or wireless, VoXML for speech to text). Since the number of XSL processors is on the rise, the need for conformance and interoperability increases.

The committee is developing a test suite for XSL processors, which will focus on two key areas. The first area is XSLT (XSL Transformation), which deals with applying a set of stylesheet transformation rules to the data and transforming the data into another document. The second area is XPath (XML Path Language), which provides a common syntax and semantics for the functionally shared by XSL transformations and XPointer (XML Pointer language). This version of the test suite will not include the formatting objects part of XSL. NIST also is developing a test suite harness to facilitate the delivery, presentation, and execution of the XSLT/ XPath test suite. Currently, there are approximately 1500 tests. The final test suite will be completed by March 2001.