XSL

[Will Rickards WT]

Anybody know any good books for learning XSL and related technologies.
I work on developing custom pages for this web product.
Their recent edition moved to an XML/XSL model and I need to learn that.
I'm familiar with ASP, vbscript, javascript and html.

 

[Howell]

A place to start anyway.
http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/

I didn't know what XSL was so I googled it.

 

[CougTek]

I didn't know what XSL was so I googled it.

Honold would drop a tear of joy.

 

[Handruin]

I didn't know until I read Howell's link. I don't fully understand the use for this until I find a good example...the hunt begins.

If you don't understand the meaning of this, think of XSL as a language that can transform XML into XHTML, a language that can filter and sort XML data, a language that can define parts of an XML document, a language that can format XML data based on the data value, like displaying negative numbers in red, and a language that can output XML data to different devices, like screen, paper or voice.

 

[Howell]

I don't fully understand the use for this until I find a good example...the hunt begins.

Based on the text you quoted, it seems to be on-the-fly formatting based on the information that is to be displayed ("red text") and taking into account the display device.

 

[Handruin]

I don't understand how the data is formatted. I think it needs specific browser support, but I may be mistaken.

I was envisioning XSL as a style sheet (for lack of better understanding) for XML. If I wanted to style my XML, or have XML displayed in a certain way, I would apply XSL...but I don't know.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

XSLT is sort of like a style sheet for xml. But it can do more than that. It actually transfroms the xml into another format. That format can be xml, xhtml, text, pdf, etc. It is most often used to transform xml to xhtml.

Here is the intro that I went through:
http://www.siteexperts.com/tips/xml/ts01/page1.asp