Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

By Steven Holzner

Part II: At a Glance

Formatting XML Documents

In Part II, you're going to start working with the actual data inside XML documents, but without using programming. You're going to see three ways of formatting XML data in the coming three days.

You'll start by using cascading style sheets (CSS), which are specified by the W3C for formatting both XML and HTML. You can do a lot to format the appearance of XML documents by using CSS. However, CSS aren't native XML.

You'll also take a look at formatting XML by using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT); XSLT is native XML. By using XSLT you can extract data from XML documents, process it, and create new HTML, RTF, text, and files, as well as files of other formats, including new XML documents—all without programming. However, you can't really format the appearance of XML data directly by using XSLT.

The general version of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) that uses special formatting objects is called XSL-FO, and it can format data down to the smallest spaces and font choices. You'll see XSL-FO in Day 10; although XSL-FO gives you a handle on just about all aspects of displaying XML data, it's pretty complex to work with.

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