Special Edition Using XSLT

In Practice

At first glance, creating an XML document might seem easy. After all, they are easy enough to write by hand. However, in a conventional program, the sequential nature of files often makes it difficult to stream out the entire document at one time. Using the DOM makes it easy to collect data in any order you like and then write out the entire XML document at once.

This method can be the basis for many powerful techniques. For example, instead of parsing the schema, you might actually want to examine the data to determine the formatting. With enough application-specific rules in a database, you might never need to write a custom XSLT document again.

Although this chapter shows examples in ASP, it is important to remember that you can ...