How this Book is Structured


The material in this book falls broadly into three parts .

The first part, in Chapters 1 to 4, is concerned with explaining concepts. Chapter 1 is about the background to the language, about how it was created and about its role and purpose. In Chapter 2 we study the processing model: the inputs and outputs of a transformation, the data model and the type system. Chapter 3 looks at the structure of a stylesheet-it describes the way a stylesheet can be divided into modules, and surveys the different kinds of declaration and instruction that a stylesheet module may contain. Chapter 4 then examines the relationship of XSLT stylesheets to XML Schemas: this linkage is at the same time one of the more powerful new capabilities in XSLT 2.0, and also one of the most controversial .

The second part of the book, in Chapters 5 to 8, contains reference information. Chapter 5 is the central core of the book, providing an alphabetical listing of every XSLT element that can appear in a stylesheet, explaining its syntax and its effect, and giving usage advice and examples. Chapter 6 describes the syntax of match patterns, which are used to define which rules in a stylesheet affect which parts of an XML document. Chapter 7 describes the XSLT function library, that is, the functions provided by XSLT for use in XPath expressions within a stylesheet, over and above the core library of XPath functions described in XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference . Then Chapter 8 discusses features in the language designed to provide extensibility, in particular the ability to link to extension functions written in other languages such as Java or JavaScript.

The third part of the book, comprising Chapters 9 to 12, is designed to show how the parts of the language come together when writing real XSLT applications. Chapter 9 discusses a number of design patterns that can be used when applying XSLT to different kinds of problem, taking time to explain the way that XSLT can be used as a functional programming language to tackle complex computational problems. The remaining three chapters are presented as case studies that exemplify these design patterns: Chapter 10 studies a stylesheet written to render technical specifications into HTML, Chapter 11 looks at a suite of stylesheets designed for transformation and presentation of structured genealogical data, and Chapter 12 looks at a purely computational problem, the calculation of a knight 's tour around the chessboard. (I was pleased recently to be told that one of my readers had found this inspirational when working out how to calculate the placement of table cells on an HTML page in a far less exotic application.)

Finally, the appendices give ancillary information that will typically be of interest to some readers and not to others. The first two appendices summarize the XPath syntax and function library; the next two give information about the APIs used to control XSLT transformations in the Java and Microsoft environments. Appendix E is about the Saxon product, and Appendix F summarizes the main backwards -compatibility issues that arise when converting from XSLT 1.0 to XSLT 2.0. The book ends with a glossary and an index.




XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference
NetBeansв„ў IDE Field Guide: Developing Desktop, Web, Enterprise, and Mobile Applications (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 764569090
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 324

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