XML/XSL Project

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Selected Resources for Learning About XSLT

The following is a list of selected XSLT resources we've found to be especially valuable:

Reference guides
Introductions & examples
Debugging & tracing stylesheets
Mailing lists

Reference guides

XSLT Programmer's Reference Michael Kay's book is highly recommended for anyone who wishes to write XSLT stylesheets. You can find many customer reviews of this book on reseller Amazon.com's Web site. As of 2001-05-09, we know of no other, similarly comprehensive guide to XSLT. (Several other XSLT books are scheduled to be released later during 2001, and one or more of these may also prove to be valuable.)

XSLT: Working with XML and HTML Khun Yee Fung's book is relatively new. You can find customer reviews of this book on reseller Amazon.com's Web site. This book has a heavy emphasis on transforming XML to HTML. Chapter 11, in particular, offers some useful "Idioms and Tips."

Introductions & examples

Rescuing XSLT from Niche Status: A Gentle Introduction to XSLT through HTML Templates

In this tutorial, David Jacobs presents just five XLST constructs, each with a simple example, from which he believes that "web developers could meet the majority of their presentation needs." His aim in creating this tutorial was to make XSLT as easy to use in creating dynamic Web pages as PHP, Cold Fusion, and other highly accessible Web scripting languages. Of note, there is a fascinating discussion thread on this tutorial article in the archives of the xsl-list. Among the points raised by several participants in this discussion is that Jacobs' suggested approach is somewhat rigid, in that it "pulls" data from XML and places them into fixed locations within a template HTML document. This is in contrast to the more flexible, albeit more complex, approach of "pushing" data through a succession of stylesheet templates.

XSLT Transformations

Chapter 14 of Elliotte Rusty Harold's book, The XML Bible, provides a clearly-written, highly accessible description of the primary features of XSLT stylesheets.

Transforming XML with XSLT

Chapter 7 of Steve Muench's book, Building Oracle XML Applications, in addition to introducing features of XSLT stylesheets, does an excellent job in describing the behavior of XSLT processors in a number of areas. These include his explanations of how multiple stylesheet templates successively build a result tree, of the 'built-in' templates which are invoked if you have a plain vanilla stylesheet, and of the subtle differences between calling named templates and applying templates matching a particular pattern. He also provides some simple, useful stylesheet debugging tips.

Transforming XML

A series of regular columns by Robert DuCharme, each covering a discrete XSLT topic. Each of these columns includes clearly-written, practical XSLT examples.

XSLT Questions and Answers

This section of Dave Pawson's XSLT FAQ provides numerous practical examples of how XSLT features can be used to perform specific tasks. These examples have been 'gleaned' from the XSL mailing list (below).

XSL Concepts and Practical Use

A gentle, concise introduction to XSLT by Paul Grosso and Norman Walsh, expressed as a set of slides. Includes many concrete examples featuring original XML documents, simple XSLT stylesheets applied to these, and the transformation results.

Debugging & tracing stylesheets

Stylesheet Debugging

Robert DuCharme's XML-Journal article discusses the use of xsl:message and/or the trace features of XSLT processors such as Xalan and SAXON to debug one's stylesheets. He also advocates creating templates to account for every element type and thus "never relying on the default template rules for processing elements."

Debugging a Stylesheet

This section of Microsoft's XSLT Developer's Guide describes five common stylesheet errors and how to debug these.

Transforming XML with XSLT

Near the end of Chapter 7 of Steve Muench's book, Building Oracle XML Applications, the author offers some simple stylesheet debugging tips.

XSLDebugger

Chris Stefano's free Visual Basic tool for interactive debugging of XSLT stylesheets. (Requires Windows 95/98/NT4/2000, as well as seven additional support software components.)

XSLT-process

Ovidiu Predescu's free 'minor mode' for GNU Emacs/XEmacs allows that text editor to "run an XSLT processor in debug mode and view what happens during the XSLT transformation. You can set breakpoints, run step by step into your stylesheet, view global and local XSLT variables and many more." As of 2001-06-20, its debugging features work exclusively with the SAXON XSLT processor, although support for Xalan-J is said to be coming soon.

XSL Tracer

Zvon.com provides an interactive tool which allows you to trace, step-by-step, exactly what happens when an XSLT stylesheet is used to transform an XML document. (Requires a frames-capable Web browser with JavaScript enabled.) Jirka Jirat's free program, used to create the interactive examples on Zvon.com's Web site, is also available for downloading. (Requires Perl and the Saxon XSLT processor.)

Mailing lists

XSL-List

Archives of the primary XSL mailing list. Postings to this list provide many valuable examples of XSLT techniques. (This link is to the unofficial archives, which were more up-to-date and offered faster access than the official archives when we last checked both on 2000-10-24.)

XSLTalk

Archives of a second, active XSL mailing list on eGroups.com.

URL:http://seaotter.berkeley.edu/xml/xslt-resources.html
Last modified on Wednesday, 20-Jun-2001 10:46:45 PDT