Miscellaneous

A Sample Chapter from "Professional XSL". This chapter will provide you with enough information to start building useful XSLT stylesheets. I will introduce a number of the elements that make up the language, providing examples of their use. We will also look at a few of the functions built into the language and see how XSLT manages namespaces, whitespace and some other important issues.

In current approaches, DTDs are static. As a result, DTD designers try to cover every contingency and, when this effort fails, users have to force their information to fit existing types. The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) changes this situation by giving information architects and developers the power to extend a base DTD to cover their domains. This article shows you how to leverage the extensible DITA DTD to describe new domains of information.

This article describes how an XSLT processor, in this case the author's open-source Saxon, actually works. Although several open-source XSLT implementations exist (see Resources), no one, as far as we know, has published a description of how they work. This article is intended to fill that gap. It describes the internal workings of Saxon, and shows how this processor addresses XSLT optimization.

This article introduces the W3C's XQuery specification, currently winding its way toward Recommendation status after emerging from a long incubation period behind closed doors. The complex specification consists of six separate working drafts, with more to come. This article provides some background history, a road map into the documentation, and an overview of some of the technical issues involved in the specification. A sidebar takes a quick look at some key features of XQuery's surface syntax. Code samples demonstrate the difference between XQuery and XQueryX and show examples of the surface syntax.

This article casts a critical eye on the Simple Object Access Protocol, assessing the value this much-discussed new technology can provide developers and demonstrating its foundation in a mixture of the old RPC (remote procedure calls) technology and in XML. It examines RPC, XML-RPC, RMI, and SOAP in detail, comparing and contrasting the use of each, and discusses whether SOAP makes sense. This article also includes sample code for a SOAP envelope.

This article shows how to use HTML as an intermediate language so that you can write a single stylesheet to translate from XML to one or more versions of HTML and use the features of the WebSphere Transcoding Publisher server to translate the resulting HTML to the target markup language the requesting device requires.