Introduction

This chapter differs from the others because the examples represent mini-XSLT applications covering a diverse set of domains (a potluck, if you will). Many examples relate to the use of specific commercial software. As software vendors embrace XML, they provide opportunities for their products to be used in ways they never imagined (or did not get around to implementing).

Microsoft is one vendor that has jumped on the XML bandwagon. The latest versions of Microsoft Visio (Version 10.0) and Excel (Office XP Version 10.0) both support XML output. Visio is a proprietary vector drawing package, and Visio's XML output (called Visio VDX) is also Visio-specific. John Breen has done an admirable job converting this output to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). His code is featured in Recipe 13.1.

Microsoft Excel allows spreadsheets to be saved in XML. Unfortunately, the XML directly models the structure of an Excel spreadsheet. Recipe 13.2 shows how to convert them to a more usable form.

Topic Maps are an up-and-coming XML technology for modeling knowledge in a way that makes information published on the Web more useful to both people and machines. XTM is an open standard for representing topic maps in XML. By analogy, software developers model knowledge about systems by using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). UML has its own standard XML representation known as XML Metadata Interchange (XMI). UML and Topic Maps do not serve the same audience; however, UML is rich enough to capture the concepts addressed by Topic Maps if you follow certain conventions. Since UML has been around longer than Topic Maps, the software tools are more mature. Recipe 13.3 shows how the XMI output of a popular UML authoring tool (Rational Rose) can be converted into XTM Topic Maps.^[1]

^[1] You might call this recipe Acronym Conversion Software (ACS).

One of XTM's most useful features is its ability to generate web sites. Recipe 13.4 addresses this Topic Map application. Nikita Ogievetsky contributed this recipe based on his work on the Cogitative Topic Maps Web Site (CTW) framework

Finally, we clean up the chapter with some SOAP, the W3C's XML format for implementing web services. The Simple Object Access Protocol is a way for software systems to communicate via standardized XML messages. This section addresses a SOAP-related draft specification called Web Service Definition Language (WSDL). As its name implies, WSDL is an XML specification for documenting a SOAP service. This discussion shows how to convert WSDL into human-readable documentation.

The examples in this chapter are long, but you can find the full source code at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/xsltckbk/.