Sams Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit (3rd Edition)

Hour 11. Getting Started with XSL

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

Stephen Hawking (on his book A Brief History of Time)

Unlike Mr. Hawking, I'm not afraid of a little extra complexity hurting the sales of this book. In fact, it's necessary because XSL is a more complex style sheet technology than CSS, so there is no way to thoroughly cover style sheets without things getting a little messy. Fortunately, as you learn in this hour, XSL is a technology that has considerably more to offer than CSS. XSL is designed to do a whole lot more than just format XML content for display purposes; it gives you the ability to completely transform XML documents. You learn in this hour how to transform XML documents into HTML documents that can be viewed in web browsers. Additionally, you should realize that the extra complexity in XSL is quite worth the learning curve because of its immense power and flexibility.

In this hour, you'll learn

• The basics of XSL and the technologies that comprise it

• The building blocks of the XSL Transformation (XSLT) language

• How to wire an XSL style sheet to an XML document

• How to develop an XSLT style sheet