XML

Apache XML Projects

XSL vs XSLT vs XSL-FO - I didnt realise this but the original W3C intention for the XSL spec was that it would be focused on producing a specification that browser and other UA vendors would use to build rendering/parsing engines (like Gecko) that would take formatting instructions marked up in a generic XSL form (think latex) then render it directly for the browsers display UI.

What actually happened is the vendors saw greater us in simply using XSL for transforming XML into HTML and just rendering that, not using the independent format and directly rendering it for display. Also, XSLT turned out to be useful for non-web use as we know so basically what we now know as XSLT is just a portion of what was originally planned, and there is a seperate XSL-FO spec.

Xalan and Java - The Apache project's XSLT engine Xalan, can be used to compile transformations into runable Java applets. This would be really useful where you had a bunch of high-volume transformations you wanted to run (maybe some offline or batchec process).

Lenya - this CMS bolt-on on top of Cocoon is about to be released from Incubation status. That sounds a bit fuzzy but its basically ready to go. Sounds good, but requires a bit of effort I'm guessing to get to grips with the Cocoon back-end.

See Also: XML Technologies | Notes Index

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