Quick Start Guide
178 Tutorial: Displaying XML Data
This tutorial takes you through the steps of creating an XSLT page and
performing a client-side transformation (mainly because the client-side
workflow is much easier to execute, and doesn’t require the use of an
application server.) For more information about other ways to deploy
XSLT pages, see “Learn about other deployment options” on page 194.
Learn about XSLT pages
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 when working with server-side transformations.
In this tutorial, you’ll create an entire XSLT page and use it to transform a
sample XML file. The transformation will be a client-side transformation
that uses a modern browser (Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 8, Mozilla 1.8,
or Firefox 1.0.2). Server-side transformations are beyond the scope of this
tutorial as they require that you have an application server configured with
a transformation engine.
For a comprehensive overview of server-side and client-side XSL
transformations, see “About server-side XSL transformations” and “About
client-side XSL transformations” in Using Dreamweaver (Help > Using
Dreamweaver).