Comments on: XSLT Roundup

By: d4rr3ll

d4rr3ll — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 13:55:15 +0000

Useful set of links, thanks.

Another interesting article here that demonstrates a ways of seperating presentaion from data.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/07/26/xslt/xsltstyle.html

notice that it's over 5 years old!

By: Kevin Hale

Kevin Hale — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:58:11 +0000

Mike, that’s nice. I went through the same thing when I sat down and actually started building designs with XSLT. If you’re a designer and you’re paired with a decent developer that’s also aware of XSL, you’ll see development speeds increase dramatically. It’s nice to be able to separate completely what I do in a CSS wireframe from what a the programmer does with the client and server side scripting.

By: Mike Rundle

Mike Rundle — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 18:39:12 +0000

Honestly, learning XSLT was the most eye-opening and useful thing I learned in 4 years of college. I can't wait to use it again on a project since it's been awhile.

A few years back I put together a sample website done all in XML/XSLT for a grad class I took, check it out: bmwXML

The background is a little goofed in Safari, but it works great in the other browsers.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:08:35 +0000

I don’t know that it’ll ever be as universal as CSS, because most people are going to want to stick to their favorite scripting languages to create UI’s. BUT, XSLT is a good choice when you have data to be displayed that fits well within a dom, and is well-formed and described. It’s also a good choice when your development resources are limited. It makes dividing the labor up between backend and frontend folks easier. All you have to do to get started is agree on the structure of the XML to be transformed and they can both go off and build to that structure.

It’s also a handy thing to have in your RSS feeds to help folks who may not know what they are (see any Feedburner feed or http://lawver.net/kevin.xml for an example).

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:49:42 +0000

You guys are the best! These lists you make are extremely helpful keep on making them :)

By: Scott Johnson

Scott Johnson — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:13:43 +0000

I downloaded oXygen for my iBook last week. It’s a really slick tool. I’m looking at XML totally differently now. It certainly beats a plain old text editor.

By: Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 22:17:45 +0000

Oops, that was meant to read “So I won’t go the way of the font tag.” Indeed, it is dead.

By: Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 22:14:10 +0000

Just when I start to get comfortably complacent in my obsolescence, you have to go and say something like this…

“There is going to be a point in the future when not knowing how to create web sites using XSL is going to be like not knowing how to create web sites using CSS. Don’t let it happen to you.”

Fine then, I’ll read your links, and learn XSLT so I won’t go the way of the tag. :)

By: Manuzhai

Manuzhai — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:50:19 +0000

Great! I think XSLT is a very powerful language, I don't really understand why so few people are using it. It's a little verbose, but there's a LOT you can do with it, and performance is pretty good.

I wrote a little bit of evangelism once:

http://www.manuzhai.nl/weblog/comments/the-power-of-xslt/

By: ToddG

ToddG — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:37:36 +0000

Has anyone written a sane shortcut language yet for XSLT? As in textile/markup sorta thing. It almost seems like this is an attempt to raise the bar so web developers can keep their jobs ;-)

Seriously though, I see the point, but they surely created something only standards writers and fellow-travelers (and eventually, tools/IDE developers) could love. If HTML had started out like this there'd probably still be no WWW as we now know it.