XSL Stylesheet and Transformation with XML Sitemaps

• XSL: Extensible Stylesheet Language. This covers a range of XML extensions.
• XSLT: XSL Transformations. Used to transform XML files into other formats, e.g. XHTML.

When using an internet browser to view XML sitemap files without above, your browser may state there is no stylesheet associated with the XML document, and that it will use its default rendering instead.

That is not an error.

The XML sitemaps protocol has no mention of XSL and XSLT, and search engines have no use for them. Search engines read the raw XML sitemaps and extract the data as specified in the XML sitemaps protocol.

If you want to create sitemaps for your human visitors, you can take advantage of the rich support in TechSEO360 for both simple HTML sitemap and advanced HTML sitemaps.

Most internet browsers will apply a default style when viewing XML sitemaps inside them. This means they will look differently than what they actually are.


(XML sitemap file without style information viewed in FireFox browser.)

You can either use the XSL stylesheet file always included in the installation or point our sitemap generator to another:



The code part looks like this in generated XML sitemap files:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="sitemap.xsl"?>