Real World XML

Formatting an XML Document

Writing an entire document using the XSL formatting objects is not an easy task for anything but short documents. I have a hard time imagining anyone using the formatting objects to write a book, for example. The W3C foresaw that difficulty, and that's one of the main reasons it also introduced the transformation language we took a look at in the previous chapter. You can write a document using your own tags, and you can use XSLT to transform the document so that it uses the XSL formatting objects. In practice, that's almost invariably the way it's done, which means all you have to supply is an XSLT stylesheet that can be used to convert your document to use formatting objects. In this way, an XSLT processor can do ...