Operation Manual
471
USING DREAMWEAVER
Displaying XML data with XSLT
Last updated 3/28/2012
The approach you ultimately take (server-side transformations versus client-side transformations) depends on what
you are trying to achieve as an end result, the technologies available to you, the level of access you have to XML source
files, and other factors. Both approaches have their own benefits and limitations. For example, server-side
transformations work in all browsers while client-side transformations are restricted to modern browsers only
(Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 8, Mozilla 1.8, and Firefox 1.0.2). Server-side transformations let you display XML data
dynamically from your own server or from anywhere else on the web, while client-side transformations must use XML
data that is locally hosted on your own web server. Finally, server-side transformations require that you deploy your
pages to a configured application server, while client-side transformations only require access to a web server.
For a tutorial about understanding XML, see www.adobe.com/go/vid0165.
More Help topics
XML tutorial
Server-side XSL transformations
Dreamweaver provides methods for creating XSLT pages that let you perform server-side XSL transformations. When
an application server performs the XSL transformation, the file containing the XML data can reside on your own
server, or anywhere else on the web. Additionally, any browser can display the transformed data. Deploying pages for
server-side transformations, however, is somewhat complex, and requires that you have access to an application
server.
When working with server-side XSL transformations, you can use Dreamweaver to create XSLT pages that generate
full HTML documents (entire XSLT pages), or XSLT fragments that generate a portion of an HTML document. An
entire XSLT page is similar to a regular HTML page. It contains a
<body> tag and a <head> tag, and lets you display a
combination of HTML and XML data on the page. An XSLT fragment is a piece of code, used by a separate document,
that displays formatted XML data. Unlike an entire XSLT page, it is an independent file that contains no
<body> or
<head> tag. If you want to display XML data on a page of its own, you would create an entire XSLT page, and bind
your XML data to it. If, on the other hand, you wanted to display XML data in a particular section of an existing
dynamic page—for example, a dynamic home page for a sporting goods store, with sports scores from an RSS feed
displayed on one side of the page—you would create an XSLT fragment and insert a reference to it in the dynamic page.
Creating XSLT fragments, and using them in conjunction with other dynamic pages to display XML data, is the more
common scenario.
The first step in creating these types of pages is to create the XSLT fragment. It is a separate file that contains the layout,
formatting, and so on of the XML data that you eventually want to display in the dynamic page. Once you create the
XSLT fragment, you insert a reference to it in your dynamic page (for example, a PHP or ColdFusion page). The
inserted reference to the fragment works much like an Server Side Include (SSI) — the formatted XML data (the
fragment) resides in a separate file, while in Design view, a placeholder for the fragment appears on the dynamic page
itself. When a browser requests the dynamic page containing the reference to the fragment, the server processes the
included instruction and creates a new document in which the formatted contents of the fragment appear instead of
the placeholder.