Special Edition Using XSLT

Providing Multiple Views of a Data Set

As well as enabling a better division of work between HTML designer and backend developer, the other main reason for separating content from presentation rules is to make it easier to change the presentation. In fact, if changing the presentation is easy enough, you can provide multiple views of the same information.

That goes one step beyond providing different styles. When providing a different view, you’re not just changing the color and layout, you’re altering the fundamental structure of the display.

This tends to be most appropriate in the context of table-structured input data. For example, imagine you have a three-dimensional table. Suppose it represents the volume of sales of different products ...