Professional XSL takes an applied, tutorial-style approach to teaching the core fundamentals of the XSLT, XPath and XSL-FO specifications. You'll learn how to create well structured and modularized stylesheets to generate your required output, how to change, filter, and sort data, and how to incorporate other content for presentation purposes.

XML is now the established standard for platform-neutral data storage and exchange, separating content from presentation. Its popularity is due to the flexibility of the language and the ability to reuse the data in a variety of ways. XSL is a key technology for working with XML, and is comprised of two parts: XSLT is the official language for transforming XML from one format to another, whether for restructuring/selectively processing the data or presenting the data for display; XSL-FO is a proposed vocabulary for incorporating information concerning how the document should be arranged for presentation. A related standard, XPath, is the language for addressing specific parts of an XML document.

Review

XML, which structures and describes data in text format, is taking over from proprietary data formats, but unlike HTML it has nothing to say about data representation--this is XSL's job. XSL has two parts, XLST and XSL-FO, and though the latter is little used as yet Professional XSL covers it thoroughly.

Professional XSL starts with an awkward introduction to the declarative XLST language, its associated stylesheets, namespaces and the XPath language. As you need them all to do anything--and declarative programming experience is now rare--it makes for a brain aching beginning. Interestingly, you first learn how to create a default template which produces no output.

After mastering XSLT grammar and syntax you move on to XML transformations using DOM and SAX (simple API for XML) with Java and VB, followed by the obligatory section on Microsoft's aberrant implementations of the XLS standard. The book even covers the various XML image standards--including W3C's SVG--and VoiceMail XML.

Overall, this is probably the clearest exposition of XSL available. However, XSL suffers from a combination of creeping proprietary featuritus and incompatible "standards". In Professional XSL it comes across as powerful but messy, incomplete, poorly supported and immature. This is probably why XSL's most common use remains converting data to Web pages--though as the case studies show, it can potentially do far more. Despite the problems, the combination of relentless explanation coupled with code examples of every aspect of XSL discussed makes this a highly practical choice for the XSL programmer. --Steve Patient

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