Operation Manual

470

Last updated 3/28/2012

Chapter 18: Displaying XML data with

XSLT

About XML and XSLT

Using XML and XSL with web pages

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a language that lets you structure information. Like HTML, XML lets you

structure your information using tags, but XML tags are not predefined as HTML tags are. Instead, XML lets you create

tags that best define your data structure (schema). Tags are nested within others to create a schema of parent and child

tags. Like most HTML tags, all tags in an XML schema have an opening and closing tag.

The following example shows the basic structure of an XML file:

<?xml version="1.0">

<title>Displaying XML Data with Adobe Dreamweaver</title>

<author>Charles Brown</author>

</book>

<title>Understanding XML</title>

<author>John Thompson</author>

</book>

</mybooks>

In this example, each parent <book> tag contains three child tags: <pubdate>, <title>, and <author>. But each

<book> tag is also a child tag of the <mybooks> tag, which is one level higher in the schema. You can name and

structure XML tags in any way, provided that you nest tags accordingly within others, and assign each opening tag a

corresponding closing tag.

XML documents do not contain any formatting—they are simply containers of structured information. Once you have

an XML schema, you can use the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) to display the information. In the way that

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) let you format HTML, XSL lets you format XML data. You can define styles, page

elements, layout, and so forth in an XSL file and attach it to an XML file so that when a user views the XML data in a

browser, the data is formatted according to whatever you’ve defined in the XSL file. The content (the XML data) and

presentation (defined by the XSL file) are entirely separate, providing you with greater control over how your

information appears on a web page. In essence, XSL is a presentation technology for XML, where the primary output

is an HTML page.

Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is a subset language of XSL that actually lets you display XML

data on a web page, and “transform” it, along with XSL styles, into readable, styled information in the form of HTML.

You can use Dreamweaver to create XSLT pages that let you perform XSL transformations using an application server

or a browser. In a server-side XSL transformation, the server does the work of transforming the XML and XSL, and

displaying it on the page. In a client-side transformation, a browser (such as Internet Explorer) does the work.