XSLT

XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is by now a pretty standard part of most web shop operations. The technology allows you to transform one form of XML into pretty much any other structured (or unstructured) file format. In web applications its often used to convert XML into other useful web formats like HTML, RSS or PDF.

At work we've been using it for a couple of years now in various dynamic often public web facing uses, and in back-end cron type file-system activites, and I personally use it extensively in an open-source project of mine X Apperator

Internationalisation and XSLT

Internationalisation/Localisation is likely to appear on the horizon as a component of web app i/fs, especially portal delivered ones. Its easy to capture a users personal or browser language preference but how do you pass this into an XSLT transform and have multiple translations of messages dynamically selected depeding on that language preference?

One problem with XSLT is that you cant dynamically import a resources file with xsl:import or xsl:include. You can however use the document() function to dynamically suck in an XML file or a portion of it, and its this approach which is suggested in A Thread on the XSLT List back in 2000

What’s Important About XSLT 2.0

CMSWatch published a Useful Article a while back discussing new features in XSLT 2.0. Amongst other things, there will be support for Grouping (ala SQL GROUP-BY), user-definable Functions (extensions to the standard CONTAINS, COUNT etc functions), XML Schema-like data type checking, improved string handling and regular expression support, Temporary Trees (stored in XSLT paramaters or variables). Looks like SAXON is the only full implementation, others will no doubt follow quickly

See Also: XML Technologies | Web Development | Notes Index

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