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Building a flexible presentation framework: an XSLT approach. (XSLT).

Article Excerpt
Information interchange has become key to survival in an increasingly wired world. It is in this context that industries have adopted XML as the enabling mechanism to achieve application integration. XML is ideally suited for designing a Web application that has multiple pages, some of which display common business information.

If XML can be used to represent the application's business information, then XSL can be used to transform the XML for each of these pages. While Web designers can design the pages for the Web application, they can't be expected to design XSLT stylesheets. Stylesheet designers, on the other hand, are good at embedding transformation logic but are not conversant with writing HTML code or presentation tricks. This makes it hard to write XSLT stylesheets that transform the XML to HTML specific to each page. If Web designers can add special "tags" as placeholders for content, then those tags can be transformed at runtime using stylesheet rules.

This article will address performance, flexibility, and ease of maintenance in the context of a framework that combines the capabilities of Java servlets, XML, and XSLT to present business information as Web pages to an end user.

The Basics

XML is a subset of SGML. It was developed to provide features that are related to Web publishing environments.

XHTML is well-formed HTML. The loosely defined HTML specification can introduce interpretation problems to the browser and make it harder for HTML writers to validate the correctness of the HTML...

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