XSLT, XSL-FO, XPath, Apache = Lifelong Learning

October 21, 2003 | 9 Comments

Who ever said being a professional Web designer was easy? Lately I’ve been coming up against several interesting real world problems down at the day job that have me beginning to delve into more of the development side of “Web design and development”.

I’ve always had an interest in XML so I’m looking forward to it. I’ve got the O’Rielly XSLT book, a pretty solid understanding of the basics of XML, some experience, some inspiration and a few pointers. So I’m almost ready to go.

I imagine many of you might have some experience with XSLT, specifically (but not limited to) working with XHTML, XML and PDF, and I’d love to hear any advice you have about picking it up and how to best go about learning this stuff. Especially if you’re a designer or “lite” developer like me.

At the same time I’m taking this opportunity to finally bear down and get into Apache as I plan on using my Powerbook (as opposed to my IIS framework) for all of this work. Any pointers or resources there would be great as well. I’ve got a handle on the basics but need to broaden my knowledge a bit.

This is what I love about my job, the constant variety and challenge of learning something new every day. At times it makes those unrealistic “Web” job descriptions all that more realistic. Maybe I should see about changing my title to “Web Producer”?

Nah, then no one whould have a clue what the hell I was doing.

Filed under: Life and Such

Comments

1. Karl Nelson said:

Here’s some random thoughts/advice:

O’Reilly’s XML in a Nutshell covers XML and XSLT quite well. It was one of my big resources when I learned this stuff.

W3Schools.com has good XML-related tutorials and reference material.

Depending on what type of project you’re working on, check out FOP. Its a java-based XSL-FO renderer. I’ve had great luck using it with ColdFusion.

XSL-FO is one of the more verbose languages you’ll ever run across. You’re basically doing print page layout by hand in a text editor. Parts of the syntax are similar to CSS, but without any of the simplicity and elegance of CSS. Its quite powerful, and I think the only practical way to get some types of text (like variable-sized text blocks) into PDF.

Good luck!

Posted on October 21, 2003 03:31 PM | #

2. Dan Cederholm said:

An invaluable resource while I was learning XSLT is Dave Pawson’s XSLT Questions and Answers. There are so many quirky things about XSLT, and this site has a mountain of info that’ll help you out of certain situations.

Posted on October 21, 2003 04:08 PM | #

3. Simon Willison said:

Have you tried Python yet? It’s got some great tools for processing XML, and the interactive interpreter is great for playing around with them without ever even writing a full Python script. It can also wash your car, clean your gutters and cause women to swoon at 20 paces :)

Posted on October 21, 2003 08:48 PM | #

4. zlog said:

I wouldn’t use PHP for working with XML as its parsing (of XML) is not what it should be. Although it does handle XSLT fine…

http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/XML/XSLTrans/

Posted on October 21, 2003 11:59 PM | #

5. JC said:

I recently had to learn XSL in a day to fix the weather display on our intranet… weather.com decided to change their system. Websphere studio was quite a valuable tool for testing as I coded; and this XSLT book helped immensely. Wish Wrox hadn’t gone out of business…

I was doing it on ColdFusion 4.5 and had to install some custom tags so it could handle XML as well as CFMX does.

Posted on October 22, 2003 01:12 PM | #

6. Drew McLellan said:

Top tip for working with XSLT and larger XML documents: open up the XML in something that will display it nicely formatted (like IE or Moz) and then print a copy. Work with the printout in front of you and you have one less sizeable chunk of data to hold in your head. Seeing the visual structure helps when getting your head around XPath too.

Posted on October 23, 2003 04:24 AM | #

7. Keith said:

Thanks a bunch. Those are some great tips that I’m sure will prove very helpful. Oh and Simon, I do plan on looking into Python at some point, and you know I’ll be digging through your site when I do.

Thanks again.

Posted on October 23, 2003 10:07 AM | #