[programming] Acronym for Extensible Style Language. A set of standards for defining XML document presentation and transformation. An XSL style sheet may contain information about how to display tagged content in an XML document, such as font size, background color, and text alignment. An XSL style sheet may also contain XSLT code that describes how to transform the tagged content in an XML document into an output document with another format. The W3C maintains the XSL standards.