The '''Citation Style Language''' (CSL) is an XML-Based stylesheet language for formatting of citations and bibliographies. It is used in reference management software such as [[Zotero]], [[Mendeley]], [[CiteProc]] and [[Pandoc]]. CSL was initiated by Bruce D’Arcus in the XBib project. The latest specification of the language, CSL 1.0, was published in March 2010.
== The idea behind CSL == Citation output is generated using CSL in a way similar to XSLT processing. If you know [[BibTeX]] you can compare CSL with the BibTeX style file language BAFLL (BibTeX Anonymous Forth-Like). The basic idea is to separate bibliographic data and the citation style definitioncomment6, so that nicely formatted citations in various styles can be generated from a single body of data. CSL-Style | v Bibliographic record -> CSL-Processor -> Citation CSL processors have been written in a variety of programming languages. The most complete implementation of CSL 1.0 at present is the Javascript implementation, [http://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/wiki/Home citeproc-js], which runs in Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers, Google Chrome, Safari, IE6 and above, and in Rhino and spidermonkey/tracemonkey for server-side deployments.
== Getting started ==