I had a dream the other night. It was really frightening. But like I
told my analyst, this dream won't make a lot of sense if you haven't read about my money-making scheme using XML and my mother's recipes.
Anyway, the dream ...
It's the year 2001. I've set up a Web site with my mom's recipes, and it's going great. I'm getting pageviews galore and the feedback is terrific. Then the call comes. Michael Ovitz is on the phone. He tells me he wants back in the biz and he sees these recipes as the gateway. He thinks the potential is there not only for cookbooks, but a series of action movies with Sally Field as a crime-fighting kung-fu gourmet cook. All he needs to get the ball rolling is a list of the 250-plus recipe titles and their ingredients. And he needs them in 15 minutes. I'm ecstatic. I'm thrilled. Then I realize that I've used HTML.
I wake up screaming - cold sweat pouring down my face.
Why is this a nightmare? This dream takes place in the future, at a
time when XML and its companion, the eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations (XSLT), is widely implemented. Even so, I set up the whole recipe site using HTML, not XML. And, HTML being HTML, there is no way to
extract and reformat pieces of information short of a tedious
cut-and-paste-athon. CSS is equally useless for this task.
But if I had used XSLT in the dream, I could have generated that
list in a snap and gone on to leech happily off the talent and effort of
others.
Happily, the promise of XSLT is becoming a reality.
The 1.0 version of the spec is now
an official W3C recommendation. So you won't have to worry about it
changing on a daily basis. The most popular Web servers on the market,
including Microsoft and
Apache, are working to integrate XSLT
into their software.
You may not be ready to re-tag all of your existing content in XML and send it through an XSLT processor, but at some point this language may make your life a great deal
easier. Furthermore, without knowing a little XSL, it's pretty difficult to
understand some of the frequently touted advantages of XML.
So let's look at a few of the general concepts behind XSLT.
next page»
