XSLT

eXtensible Stylesheet Language Translation is act of applying a specially formatted file which contains an XSL translation specification for the content of a particular XML file, translating the context from raw XML format into a formatted HTML page (or other application/GUI element).

Structure

The structure of an XSLT requires three parts:

A well-formed XML document we want to parse
An XSL file for grabbing the desired data from the XML document and performing the transformation
A target HTML file with a particular look & feel we want to generate and present to the end-us

These three components and the flow of a typical transformation is nicely summarized in the following diagram:

Transforming an XML document to HTML

EXAMPLE

For example, with the following XML document for defining a shareable Contact list:

 <AddressBook>
   <contact type="simple">
     <name>John Doe</name>
     <title>CEO, Company Inc.</title>
     <email>john.doe@company.com</email>
     <phone>(123) 456-7890</phone>
   </contact>
   ...
 </AddressBook>

We can extract each contact's information via the XSL:

 <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
   <xsl:template match="contact[@type='simple']">
     <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
       <title>business card</title>
       <body>
         <ul>
           <xsl:apply-templates select="name"/>
           <xsl:apply-templates select="title"/>
           <xsl:apply-templates select="email"/>
           <xsl:apply-templates select="phone"/>
         </ul>
     </body>
     </html>
   </xsl:template>
   <xsl:template match="contact/name">
     <li>
     <h1><xsl:value-of select="text()"/></h1>
   </xsl:template>
   <xsl:template match="contact/title">
     occupation: <h3><xsl:value-of select="text()"/></em></h3>
   </xsl:template>
   <xsl:template match="contact/email">
     <p>email: <a href="mailto:{text()}"><tt><xsl:value-of select="text()"/></tt></a></p>
   </xsl:template>
   <xsl:template match="contact/phone">
     <p>phone#: <a href="tel:{text()}"><xsl:value-of select="text()"/></a></p>
     <li>
   </xsl:template>
 </xsl:stylesheet>

This will output the following HTML to be displayed in the user's browser:

 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <title>Address Book</title>
 <body>
   <ul>
     <li>
       <h1>John Doe</h1>
       <h3><em>CEO, Widget Inc.</em></h3>
       <p>email: <a href="mailto:john.doe@widget.com"><tt>john.doe@widget.com</tt></a></p>
       <p>phone: (202) 456-1414</p>
     </li>
     ...
   </ul>
 </body>
 </html>

Tools

http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt?xslfile=http://tomi.vanek.sk/xml/wsdl-viewer.xsl &xmlfile=http://198.164.40.210:8080/SAVOIR_MgmtServices/services/UserManagerWS?wsdl &transform=Submit

AJAXSLT

AJAXSLT is an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications. Because XSL-T uses XPath, it is also an implementation of XPath that can be used independently of XSL-T.