Real World XML

Creating Tables

Some of the most useful constructs that you can format with XSL are tables. A table in XSL is much like one in HTML—a rectangular grid of rows and columns of cells. You can use nine formatting objects to create tables:

• fo:table-and-caption

• fo:table

• fo:table-column

• fo:table-caption

• fo:table-header

• fo:table-footer

• fo:table-body

• fo:table-row

• fo:table-cell

Creating tables is a little involved in XSL. You create a fo:table object and then format each column with a fo:table-column object. Then you create a table-body object, as well as table-row objects for each row and table-cell objects for each cell in each row. Here's an example creating a 3×3 table with the words Tic, Tac, and Toe repeated on each line:

Listing . ch14_08.fo

<?xml version="1.0" ...