| This book is for people who need to learn XSLT quickly. While it isn’t meant to be a complete reference of everything you might want to do in XSLT, it will show you the twenty percent of XSLT that you’ll probably use eighty percent of the time. It also includes a user’s guide for looking up simple solutions to the most common problems you will encounter when doing more advanced XSLT development.
The two parts of the book address the two parts of this goal.
Part 1 is a step-by-step tutorial that will bring you up to speed with basic concepts and document manipulation techniques necessary for the most common XSLT tasks. More importantly, part 1 will give you the background to understand part 2.
Part 2 is a task-oriented user’s guide to various issues you may need to tackle in XSLT. Instead of being organized by XSLT features (for example, attribute value templates, namespace aliasing, and the document() function), part 2 is organized by the goals of your tasks (for example, converting elements to attributes, writing stylesheets to create other stylesheets, and reading in multiple documents at once). This format will make it easier for readers who don’t already know XSLT to find solutions to their stylesheet development problems.
Unlike part 1, part 2 is not meant to be read from start to finish. It’s a place to find complete answers to specific problems. If a section seems repetitive in places, it’s only to ensure that each section can stand on its own. For example, certain techniques basic to both deleting elements and moving elements are explained in both sections.
When you do know a particular XSLT concept or specialized element type but are not sure how to use it, the book’s glossary and index will help you find the explanation you need. For example, looking up the document() function in the index will point you to the section in part 2 on reading multiple documents at the same time.
This book assumes that if you’re interested in transforming XML documents, you’re already familiar with the basics of XML: elements, attributes, well-formedness, and entity references. Readers who want to know how XSLT handles more complex XML topics such as CDATA, namespaces, and unparsed entities will find these covered in part 2, chapter4, “Advanced XML markup,” on page 84.
HTML is simpler than XML, and because XSLT is so popular for converting XML to HTML, this book assumes a basic familiarity with HTML: the p element used for paragraphs, the img element used for images, b for bolding, i for italicizing, the h1, h2, and h3 elements used for different levels of headers, and the a element used for linking. |
