• Introduction
• Other similar ressources
• Vision
• XSLT 2.0 and XQuery
• The XSLT transforms library
• How to transform
• Projects of new transforms

Introduction

This is a nice collection of useful XSLT transforms, models and reusable fragments under GPL, involving HTML tables, XML Schema, HTML GUI, MathML, SQL analogy, etc. This has been developped as part of the "Worlwide Botanical Knowledge Base" project, ( http://wwbota.free.fr/ ).

The transforms fall within the following (mutually exclusive) categories :

proof of concept

aims at showing the possibilities of XSLT in various domains; far from production quality

pedagogical

small examples

design pattern

starting points of frequent use to write transforms, not for direct use but after editing (about design patterns see the book "Design Patterns" by E. Gamma et al.)

production

XSLT transforms of production quality, for direct use

template library

for use as imported stylesheet, of production quality

Other similar ressources

• http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/xslfaq.html FAQ
• http://IncrementalDevelopment.com/xsltrick/ the extreme XSLT
• http://xsltsl.sourceforge.net/ "standard XSLT library" : low-level templates like tokenizing strings, etc
• http://www.exslt.org/ extension functions for XSLT

Vision

We develop a series of useful transforms, either acting on the structure of the document, or performing generic transforms (e.g. creating an index of words), or acting on well-knows documents (e.g. XML Schema, SVG, XHTML, ...), or merging or splitting in various ways. These transforms should be able to be re-assembled (by chaining-piping, import, or other combinations) to perform complex tasks out of simple bricks. This is coherent with the vision of an XML-centered application (see Extensible browsers and XML-compliant applications on this site). This way we could also do something as useful and flexible as the Unix shells commands (wc, sed, grep, ...), and C++ Standard Template library. This sub-project is under Lesser GNU Public Licence (LGPL), so contributions are wellcome!

An application of XSLT transforms library is XMLPublication, a Web document publication framework through XML. As an example, XMLPublication was used with this HTML page as the source for generation (see XMLPub generated pages). Currently there are some XSLT transforms here that are outdated with respect to the XMLPublication distribution, and also many useful transforms there that are not here, but this will be fixed .

Transforms marqued with XSLT 1.1 or 2.0 necessitate Saxon . Mirror on WWKBK SourceForge project Page .

XSLT 2.0 and XQuery

• both XQuery and XSLT 2.0 are based on XPath 2.0 and its function library
• both are functional languages in the sense of ML and CAML, i.e. once assigned an variable cannot be changed; the reason is to make possible "incremental" processors that will be able to reprocess only the changed parts when the input changes
  

•  XQuery has no equivalent of <xsl:template> ; one has to obtain explicitly the desired node in the input (either by direct XPath expression, using variables, or possibly recursive function calls)
• the XQuery syntax is a hybrid syntax with at the first level a language à la PHP; XML content can be added freely inside instructions, and the converse is possible between {}; lists are  first class constructs
  

• eXist XML database
• Saxon is both an XSLT and XQuery processor, based an the same object implementation
  

The XSLT transforms library

How to transform

XSLT Error (org.apache.xpath.XPathException): Can not convert #RTREEFRAG to a NodeList!

• With Saxon (http://saxon.sf.net):
  java -classpath saxon.jar com.icl.saxon.StyleSheet XML_instance.xml XSLT.xslt
• With Xalan:
  java -jar xalan.jar -IN XinputXMLURL -XSL XSLTransformationURL -OUT outputFileName
  

• With XT

type on a Windows NT command window:

xt XML_instance XSLT

or

xt XML_instance result

xt is a command-line (or Java) XSLT processor available from www.jclark.com .

Projects of new transforms

• transform any XSLT transform into equivalent XQuery
  
• from an XML Schema, generate an XSLT transform with all possible matches, as an assistant to write XSLT queries adapted to a class of documents
  
• table_2_columns2XML.xslt : generate XML markup from HMTL table with field name and value
• XMLSchmema2DTD.xslt : generate DTD from XML Schema
• implement Xinclude
• wrapParags.xslt : wrap HTML paragraphs in docBook:simplesec elements
• mathDiffer.xslt: differentiate an expression in MathML
• [tentative] RDF Schema <==> XML Schema
• XML Fragment FCS (Fragment Context Specification) ==> XPath expression
• symetries, rotations, and other simple geometrical transforms for SVG (W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics); also user transforms defined by 2 expressions in coordinates $x and $y