XSLTlike

XSLTlike is a declarative XML transformation language conceived as a hypothetical tool inspired by XSLT, designed to convert XML documents into new structures. It is closely related to XSLT in spirit but aims for a smaller, easier-to-learn feature set and improved performance characteristics, especially for streaming large inputs.

Core concepts include templates, which bind to patterns in the source document; value templates that compute text or attribute values; and a set of transformation instructions such as copy, apply-templates (to recursively process child nodes), and value-of (to emit computed values).

The processing model centers on matching nodes against the stylesheet's templates and emitting a result doc or a sequence of events. XSLTlike emphasizes streaming where possible, reducing memory usage for large inputs, and provides built-in functions for string, numeric, and date operations. It supports namespaces and extensibility through user-defined extension functions.

Adoption of XSLTlike remains limited to educational literature, experimental projects, and some open-source toolchains. Tooling typically includes a compiler or interpreter that validates a stylesheet, reports errors, and runs transformations in a chosen host environment such as the JVM or JavaScript runtimes. In practice, XSLTlike serves as a conceptual bridge between simple XML transforms and full XSLT workbenches.