xsl-t tutorial

[Bill Leal]

I've looked at probably a dozen books that attempt a tutorial on xsl-t. All of them are chatty, have lots of examples, but nowhere give a clear explanation of how xsl-t works. I have managed to pick up that there's iteration, and that recursion can be used to handle some kinds of processing, but still don't know what the basic computing paradigm is.

I have a pretty good programming background and can read technical material fairly easily. Any suggestions for a concise, clear and reasonably complete intro to xsl-t?

tia ... Bill.

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

% I have a pretty good programming background and can read technical material % fairly easily. Any suggestions for a concise, clear and reasonably complete % intro to xsl-t?

I tried to give a concise and clear introduction in the manual to my rexx xml package. The package is

http://www.interlog.com/~ptjm/rexxxml100.zip

and the manual is rexxxml.pdf. It's about a 1Mb down-load. Look in the table of contents to find the XSLT section, which is about 15 pages long.

 

[Maarten Wiltink]

I've looked at probably a dozen books that attempt a tutorial on xsl-t. All of them are chatty, have lots of examples, but nowhere give a clear explanation of how xsl-t works. I have managed to pick up that there's iteration, and that recursion can be used to handle some kinds of processing, but still don't know what the basic computing paradigm is.

Declarative.

The processor starts with the root element and finds the best matching template and applies it. A template may "apply-templates", which recurses this process of finding and applying the best matching template for all nodes in the current node.

You can override what nodes to process in apply-templates. There are also named templates, which can be called like normal procedures, and for-each, which has an even more imperative flavour.

Groetjes,
Maarten Wiltink

 

[Dimitre Novatchev]

The book for studying and mastering XSLT is:

"Beginning XSLT"

by Jeni Tennison.

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Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL