RE: Newbie question

> I guess what I'm hoping to
> find is something really clean that automatically takes XML, 
> applies the XSL stylesheet provided and spits out whatever the stylesheet 
> says to spit out....in this case HTML......without having to change or add
a single 
> line of java or perl.

I think all the XSL processors do this, in a sense. But you have to call
them from somewhere, whether it's a command line, a URL, or a single line of
code in an ASP page or Java Server Page. What's appropriate depends on when
and where you want to invoke the stylesheet (client-side or server-side, or
eagerly at content publishing time).

The default way of invoking a stylesheet "automatically" is to name the
stylesheet within the XML document source and have the browser recognise it
(which IE5 does). Personally I don't like that option much because I like
the idea that different users should have different views of the same data.

In SAXON 4.2 I've provided another option, compiling the stylesheet to
create a servlet which can be referenced directly by URL, specifying the
source XML document as a parameter. I don't think this really makes your
life enormously easier, it means that instead of writing a bit of script to
invoke the stylesheet at run-time you need to write a bit of script to
compile it and install it each time you edit it: but I do think it's an
architecture that has great promise from a performance perspective.

Mike Kay


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