[xsl] XSL Sites

[Matt Gushee <mgushee at havenrock dot com>]

Sheryl Garde writes:

 > I'm just new to XSL/XML stuffs. Could someone help me
 > better understand all about XSL/XML. Maybe you could
 > give me a better site wherein i can be able to understand/
 > study about XSL/XML.

You'll find some helpful online tutorials at www.zvon.org.

 > One more thing, im quite confuse about this. 

Yeah, lots of people are. It's inherently confusing.

 > difference between XSL and XSLT/XPath/XSLFO? Maybe someone
 > could clarify this for me..

IMHO it helps a lot if you know a bit of history:

     "XSL" can refer to any of several things, but the original
     concept was a platform- and media-independent formatting
     language (eXtensible Stylesheet Language). Now, this original
     W3C proposal had two parts. First was the formatting language per
     se, which is a set of XML elements that describe parts of a page
     in a very high-level way, e.g. "<block>," "<table>," etc. These
     are the formatting objects. 

     The second part was a transformation language, which was intended
     mainly (solely?) for converting an XML document into a "result
     tree" consisting of XSL formatting objects. The original
     developers envisioned a 2-stage process:

                                             /-> output format A
	XML Source -----\                   /
                         >--> result tree -<---> output format B
	XSL Stylesheet -/                   \
                                             \-> output format C

     Well, along came big bad Microsoft and said "This is too
     complicated. Most people just want to output HTML, and we can
     do that with just the transformation part of XSL. No need for
     all these formatting objects." So they went ahead and implemented
     just the transformation language. At first they were criticized
     for their partial implementation, but then the XML community
     began to think that maybe this wasn't such a bad idea after all
     (or perhaps nobody wanted to fight Microsoft).

     And so XSL was split into two parts: XSLT and ... XSL. The
     XSL spec defines the formatting objects, and so it is
     informally known as XSLFO (or XSL-FO).

     XSLT is the transformation language, which you can use to 
     transform an XML document into another XML document, into
     HTML, or really into any type of text document. This is what
     most people are using today.

     So when people say "XSL", it can mean:

	the W3C XSL spec, AKA XSL-FO;
	the general process of transforming documents with XSLT +
	    XSL-FO; or, unfortunately:
        XSLT (or the early version of it that Microsoft implemented)

     I haven't mentioned XPath, but that's a good deal simpler.
     XPath is a syntax for identifying nodes in an XML document
     that you want to process in some way. XSLT depends on XPath,
     but it is separate because several other W3C specs depend
     on it too.

Hope this helps a bit.

Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO, USA

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