XML Publishing with AxKit

Chapter 3. Your First XML Web Site

With AxKit installed, you can begin putting it though its paces. In this chapter, we create a simple XML-based web site. Along the way, I will introduce AxKit’s facilities for how to apply stylesheets to transform data marked up in XML into a commonly used delivery format, how to combine XML from different sources, and how to configure an alternate style transformation to deliver the same XML content in a different format in response to data received from the requesting client.

Preparation

By design, XML processing tools are less forgiving about what they accept than the HTML browsers that you may be used to working with. Omitting a closing tag when creating an element in an HTML page, for example, may cause an undesirable result when the page is rendered, but the browser usually tries to recover gracefully and render something for you to see. In contrast, omitting an end tag when creating an element in a document that an XML parser will consume results in a fatal well-formedness error, and no such recovery is possible. In the context of AxKit (in which all XML processing happens on the server), this means that if you pass in a bad document, AxKit sends no content to the client. At best, you see an error message that indicates where things went wrong. To avoid frustration, take a little time to familiarize yourself with the XML processing tools available to you. At the very least, investigate how the XML parser you installed can be used from the ...