Altova® StyleVision® simplifies the creation of XSLT 1.0/2.0 stylesheets for transforming XML and database data to attractive Microsoft Word/RTF pages. It’s easy to transform XML and database data into Word documents or RTF (rich text format) files with StyleVision. The unique StyleVision design interface allows you to visually design stylesheets to produce Word/RTF output from XML – or a database – quickly and easily. In addition, that same design simultaneously produces an Authentic form, as well as HTML and PDF output and the associated stylesheets. Based on your design, StyleVision auto-generates standards conformant XSLT 1.0 stylesheets with XPath 1.0 expressions. It also includes complete implementations of the powerful new XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 specifications from the W3C. These new versions include significant improvements and new features that improve code stability and reusability, as well as an impressive array of new functions and operators. In addition, XSLT 2.0 support in StyleVision is schema-aware. Schema-awareness provides additional mechanisms for error isolation, simplified debugging, and enhanced code performance. In all, XSLT/XPath 2.0 allow you create stylesheets that are much more powerful and highly efficient.

Altova StyleVision 2006 is the ultimate visual stylesheet designer for transforming XML and database content into HTML, PDF, and Word/RTF output, and creating electronic forms. It is fully standards compliant and supports XSLT 1.0, XSLT 2.0, XSL:FO, CSS, JavaScript, and all major databases. StyleVision 2006 is optimized to facilitate single source publishing. In one simple step you can access XML and/or database data, process it, and render it into eye-catching HTML pages, PDF reports, Word/RTF documents, and intuitive Authentic electronic forms. StyleVision now includes capabilities for designing advanced Web pages, including support for cascading stylesheets (CSS) and Javascript. It even has a built-in HTML importer that converts HTML pages into XML files, XSLT stylesheets, and XML Schemas. Numerous templates for presenting industry standard XML vocabularies such as DITA, DocBook, and P3P are provided. StyleVision also generates electronic forms for use with Authentic 2006, Altova’s free XML and database content editor. Authentic forms let business users directly query and edit XML documents or relational databases without being exposed to the underlying technology. The visual design paradigm used in StyleVision is so straightforward; you simply drag and drop project contents and design elements into your working stylesheet, and you are automatically prompted when options exist. You can preview your output at any time in XSLT 1.0/2.0, HTML, Word/RTF, XSL:FO, PDF, and Authentic view, so you always know how your project is coming along. Stylesheets designed with StyleVision can be based on XML Schemas, DTDs, and databases and can support business logic validation, table handling, input formatting, date control, and much more. All these features combine to make Altova StyleVision 2006 the ultimate tool for developing multi-purpose stylesheets.

Stylus Studio provides several tools that allow you to follow XSLT processing and detect errors in your stylesheets. To use these tools, you must use the processors displayed in the Debug and back-mapping enabled section of the Processors page on the Scenario Properties dialog box. These processors include Stylus Studio's XSLT processor, Apache Xalan-J, MSXML .Net, and Saxon 6 and 8. If you use the MSXML XSLT processor or some other XSLT processor, you cannot use the Stylus Studio debugging and backmapping tools. This XSL tutorial covers the following topics:

Steps for Debugging XSL Stylesheets, Using XSL Breakpoints, Viewing Processing Information, Using Bookmarks, Determining Which XSL Template Generated Particular Output, Determining the Output Generated by a Particular XSL Template, Profiling XSL Stylesheets, Handling Parser and XSL Processor Errors, Debugging Java Files.

In addition to writing XSLT manually in the XSLT text editor, Stylus Studio provides a graphical tool, the XSLT mapper, that allows you quickly compose XSLT without writing any code. This XSLT tutorial describes the XSLT mapper, how to use it, and its relationship to the XSLT displayed on the XSLT Source tab. Creating XSLT Using the XSLT Mapper covers the following topics:

Overview of the XSLT Mapper, Source Documents, Target Structures, Mapping Source and Target Document Nodes, Working with XSLT Instructions in XSLT Mapper, Processing Source Nodes, Creating and Working with Templates, Creating an XSLT Scenario

This chapter covers: An overview of the Stylus Studio XSLT Mapper, using different data source documents, specifying ouput target data structures, Mapping source and target document nodes, working with XSLT instructions or functions in the XSLT mapper, processing source nodes, creating and working with templates, and creating an XSLT transformation scenario.

Norm Walsh responds to a recent article about CSS and XSL, explaining how and when and why you'd want to use XSLFO or CSS or XSLT.

Learning XML by itself is a bit like learning Latin. You memorize the vocabulary and some grammatical rules, but it’s not really useful until you are provided with some context and can actually apply it (in medical school, for example).

Trees are a very basic abstraction used in many computer science areas, including XML. If you're writing a document about tree structures you'll often want to show trees as graphics. This is not a problem for a few trees as they can be hand drawn in some graphics editor. But if you need dozens of trees, you would do well to use a compact text syntax for describing trees that can later be turned into nice pictures. In this article I'll show you how to parse simple text notation by means of XSLT and turn it into SVG graphics.

What do you do when you need to transform an XML file but will not know the exact structure of the XML file? This article will demonstrate a method for performing a transformation on an XML where the nodes of the document could vary.

Oleg Tkachenko shows how to make XML programming easier and to boost your productivity using XSLT and XPath extensions, provided by the EXSLT.NET library.

In Part 5 of this tutorial series on analyzing data with XSLT, the MindMap Research Team decides to tie their data in with other services, pulling information from Amazon Web Services in response to information unearthed in the analysis. Web services provide information in XML, but it's rarely in the form that you want it, so this tutorial explains how to create an application that not only retrieves the Amazon data but also transforms it into XHTML and outputs it to the browser. The stylesheet shows how to pull XML information from multiple sources within a single transformation and also includes a device that alerts developers when Amazon changes the Web service, since changes in the feed can break the application.

Yesterday I commented about XQuery moving forward in favor of XPath 1.0 and XSLT 1.0. Whether this is a good thing or not, Oleg Tkachenko has written a fine article concerning the XPath and XSLT extension, provided by the EXSLT.NET library.

For the biologist, the bioinformatic analysis of genes requires the compilation of tables of gene characteristics. To do this, data is often taken manually out of databases in an ad hoc fashion. Different databases (TIGR, MIPS, BLAIR, and NCBI, for example) give different outputs in different formats. We would like to be able to extract information from the databases in a common, structured file format in a way that allows for easy rearranging and processing of the data.

ColdFusion MX offers a simple and easy way to unleash the power of XSLT for manipulating your XML data. Here's how. From Web services to news and blog data feeds to configuration files, XML is everywhere these days.

Use ASP.NET and a generic XSL file to convert any XML data into an Excel spreadsheet. This generic XSL can be used to present XML reports to users in Excel via their web browser.

Refactoring a Web-based order entry page with 3,000 lines of VBScript and HTML wasn't easy. But with a bit of XML, XSLT, and a liberal dose of JavaScript, our author got the page down to half its size.

Michael Kay is the author of Wrox press's "XSLT Programmer's Reference," the standard reference work on XSLT, and the editor of the W3C's XSLT 2.0 specification, which is currently in Working Draft status. His Java-based Saxon XSLT processor is one of the most successful and popular XSLT processors in the language's history. The branch of Saxon supporting XSLT 1.0 is currently at release 6.5.3, and regular readers of this column will know that the 7.x branch of Saxon has been implementing more and more support for XSLT 2.0.

This is Part 2 of the developer.com introduction to XSLT. The first part was about tools and the basic syntax. I recommend you read it first.

This article concludes the introduction to XSLT at developer.com. In the previous four articles, the series has covered the essentials of XSLT coding. The final article moves to more advanced subjects such as working with functions and multiple files.