[BNM] XML / XSLT

[Stewart Birch]

Dom - do you see it falling into more of a Front End Development area then,
certainly from what you and Thayer have said it strikes me if you're used to
using CSS and the seperation of content and styling , using ( at least basic
) XSLT wouldn't need a huge leap of faith?

Stew

On 3/14/07, Dominic Mitchell <dom at happygiraffe.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 01:56:44PM +0000, Stewart Birch wrote:
> > Hello all
> >
> > so I've been sniffing around w3schools tutorials about XML and XSLT and
> was
> > just wondering who amongst us has experience of need to use XSLT a lot -
> it
> > seems ( and I tread carefully here ) pretty straightforward but in my
> > present employment I'll never have the chance to play and was hoping to
> see
> > some real life examples.
>
> We use XSLT extensively.  $COMPANY does very large websites for academic
> publishers.  All the data comes in as XML, we transform it using mostly
> XSLT and serve it up.
>
> Basic XSLT is pretty easy to get to grips with, but you do have to stop
> thinking of it like any programming language you've used before.  It's
> much closer to lisp or scheme.  But to be honest, it's best not to think
> of it as being programming at all.  Just a series of statements that say
> "when I see this bit of XML, do that".
>
> One of the key things I've found with XSLT is that it's worth knowing
> when to stop.  It's great for simple stuff, but when you find yourself
> needing complex things like recursive templates, you need to step back
> and work out if there's a better tool to solve the problem.
>
> If you do get using some XSLT, I highly recommend O'Reilly's XSLT 1.0
> pocket reference.  It's not a tutorial, but it does have all the facts
> in a compact fashion.
>
>   http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/xsltpr/
>
> -Dom
> --
>
> BNM Subscribe/Unsubscribe:
> http://lists.wessexnetworks.com/cgi-bin/mailman/options/bnmlist/
> BNM info/archives:
> http://www.brightonnewmedia.org/
>
> BNM archive search:
> http://www.roddis.org/bnm/search.php
>
> BNM powered by Wessex Networks:
> http://www.wessexnetworks.com
>



-- 
http://www.welovestewartbirch.co.uk
-----------------------------------------------------
http://www.stewartbirch.co.uk
-----------------------------------------------------
http://www.flickr.com/people/mrbirch