Professional SharePoint® 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

A Brief XSL Primer

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content authors use this power responsibly. In the next section, you will learn about how XSL works,

and later you will work with more SharePoint Web Parts that leverage XSL for their styling.

A BRIEF XSL PRIMER

The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is the basis for styling XML output in web applications.

It would be easy to draw parallels between what it does and what you saw CSS does for HTML out-

put in Chapter 7. In CSS, you create rules for how certain HTML elements appear in the rendered

HTML output within the clients’ browser. XSL does essentially the same thing for XML output.

One main difference, though, is that there are a fi nite number of elements that you can style within

CSS. That is, you can only apply rules to the number of supported elements within the HTML lan-

guage. You can get to those elements in different ways (classes, IDs, selectors, etc.), but you can only

apply rules to those elements.

In XML, there aren’t any elements that are defi ned. Anything can be an element. Consider the fol-

lowing

quiz.xml fi le, which is available with the downloads for this chapter:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8” ?>

<quiz>

<question>

<questionID>1</questionID>

<displayQuestion type=”choice”>Which platform is SharePoint built

on?</displayQuestion>

<answers>

<answer>PhP</answer>

<answer>ColdFusion</answer>

<answer>ASP.NET</answer>

<answer>J2EE</answer> ...