Approaches are described herein to represent a delta using the extensible style language transformation language (XSLT) to describe the delta between versions of a data entity. XSLT is a language that defines operations for transforming a body of data ("source") that conforms to the extended mark-up language (XML) into a different body of data ("target") typically in another format, such as HTML. A set of XML instructions represents a delta by specifying operations needed to transform or change a source version of an XML entity into a target version of an XML entity.