Ajax: Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

Chapter 10. XSLT The movie Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan introduced a device called the Genesis Torpedo that rearranged matter on a subatomic level to produce life-bearing planets. Talk about your mad scientist stuff! eXtensible Stylesheet La...

10.1. Recursive Versus Iterative Style Sheets One of the things about XSLT is that although the capability exists for iteration (looping), it is strongly frowned upon by the development community. Instead, recursive templates are considered the ac...

10.2. XPath in the Style Sheet Even though the XSLT elements in the three style sheets shown earlier are unfamiliar, they illustrate that XPath is an indispensable part of the style sheet. The recursive style sheet particularly shows this dependen...

10.3. Elements Regardless of whether you consider XSLT to be a markup language, a scripting language, or just a pain in the fanny, it is, first and foremost, a dialect of XML and, therefore, must adhere to all of XML's rules. And I mean all of XML...

10.4. XSLT Functions Unlike XPath, which has a plethora of functions, the number of XSL functions is significantly lower. Mostly, the reason for this is that the XPath functions are fully available to supplement the few functions shown in Table ...

10.5. XSLT Concepts When developing an XSL style sheet, I usually find myself using only two of the XSL functions shown earlier: the key() function and the generate-id() function, both of which are indispensable when doing something unique to XSL ...

10.6. Client-Side Transformations Now that we've got an idea of what an XSL style sheet is and what effect it has on XML, I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to see how to apply XSL in the browser. Although browsers that support XSLT all use...

10.7. Summary XSLT is one of my favorite parts of programming; however, it can be difficult to grasp. To combat this problem, we started at the beginning with iterative and recursive style sheets. Next I covered scope and the issues with nonvari...