XML Hacks

Hacks #31-58

XSLT (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt) is a declarative language for transforming XML (including XHTML) into new XML, XHTML, HTML, or text documents. It works along with a companion spec called XML Path Language, or XPath for short (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath). XSLT munges the markup while XPath locates the nodes. This chapter covers a range of hacks that deal with XSLT and XPath. This is the longest chapter and it contains many hacks; here are some of the highlights.

We start out with an introductory hack for XSLT [Hack #31] . Later you will get up to speed with the XPath 1.0 data model using the TreeViewer stylesheets [Hack #34] . You’ll transform XML into CSV [Hack #41] and transform into HTML an iTunes library file [Hack #44] .

You’ll pull information out of a MySQL database in XML form [Hack #46] and learn the basics of XSL-FO [Hack #48] . You’ll also learn how to process HTML as if it were XML with TagSoup [Hack #49] and you’ll create dithered scatterplots using SVG [Hack #55] . There are also a few hacks that use XSLT 2.0 [Hack #45] and [Hack #57] ).

The example files mentioned in this chapter are available from a file archive that can be downloaded from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/xmlhks/.