It’s been a while, almost six years, since I have written my Style-free XSLT Style Sheets piece for XML.com but this simple technique remains one of my favorite.
It has not only been my first article published on XML.com but also the subject of my first talk in an IDEAlliance XML conference and it’s fair to say that it as been instrumental to launch my career of « international XML guru ».
Despite all that, this technique remains my favorite because for its efficiency. I am using it over and over. To generate (X)HTML but also many other XML vocabularies. I have been using it to generate vocabularies as different as OpenOffice documents and W3C XML Schemas. The more complex is the vocabulary to generate, the more reasons you have to keep it outside your XSLT transformations and the more efficient style-free stylesheets are.
Style-free stylesheets have become a reflex for me and that’s without even thinking about them that I have written a style-free stylesheet to power the web site of our upcoming Web 2.0 book.
In my antique XML.com paper, I had been using specific, non XHTML elements:
<td width="75%" bgcolor="Aqua">
<insert-body/>
</td>
That’s working fine, but your layout documents are no longer valid XHTML and they don’t display like target documents in a browser.
Why not follow the microformats approach and use regular XHTML elements with specif class attribues instead:
<div id="planet">
<h1>Planet Web 2.0 the book</h1>
<p>Aggregated content relevant to this book.</p>
<div class="fromRss"/>
.../...
</div>
In this case, the XSLT transformation replaces the content of any element with a class attribute containing the token « fromRSS » by the formated output of the RSS feed. This has the additional benefit that I can leave mock-up content to make the layout look like a final document:
<div id="planet">
<h1>Planet Web 2.0 the book</h1>
<p>Aggregated content relevant to this book.</p>
<div class="fromRss">
<ul>
<li>
<div>
<h2>
<a
href="http://www.orbeon.com/blog/2006/06/02/about-json-and-poor-marketing-strategies/"
title="XForms Everywhere » About JSON and poor marketing strategies"
>XForms Everywhere » About JSON and poor marketing
strategies</a>
</h2>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>
<a href="http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/web2.0thebook" title="RSS feed (on del.icio.us)">
<img src="feed-icon-24x24.png" alt="RSS feed"/>
</a> (on <a href="http://del.icio.us/" title="del.icio.us">del.icio.us</a>)</p>
</div>
What I like with simple ideas is that they always leave room for reuse and improvements (complex ideas on the other hand seem to only leave room for more complexity).