Tools and Implementations
This is a brief review of many sources of XSL information, tools, and implementations available at the time of writing. No such review printed in a book can be completely up to date. Most, or at least many, of the things mentioned here have a reasonable chance of surviving at least as long as there is interest in this book. Developments occurring after this writing will be missing. The future will be just like today, only different.
No review of resources, tools, and implementations can hope to be complete. Enough pointers should be here to help you find a good deal of what is available for XSL. Certainly, you will be able to use the "Formatters" section to find and download a formatter that will help you experiment with the examples in this book.
Online Resources
The first thing to know about tools and implementations for XSL is http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/. This Web site maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) contains up-to-date links to many XSL resources. New information appears from time to time. This W3C site acts as a portal for much of the best information about XSL.
A current discussion group on Yahoo! averages about 100 posts per month. The posts center around practical usage issues. The locator for that group is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xsl-fo/. Subscribe to it by sending an empty mail message to XSL-FO-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
The locator for the FO interest mailing list at the W3C is http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xsl-fo/. This list is somewhat less active than the list at Yahoo!, but it has similar content.
The XML.org Web site hosted by Oasis at http://www.xml.org/xml contains a great deal of XML-related materials. It currently places CSS and XSL related links at http://www.xml.org/xml/resources_focus_cssxslfo.shtml.
Dave Pawson has placed many pointers about FO at http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect3/index.html. He gleaned these from the XSL interest list at Mulberry Technologies, http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/. He also placed a draft of a book about FO online at http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect3/bk/index.html.
Many useful articles about XML in general and XSL in particular may be found at IBM's developerWorks Web site located at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/.