Anyway, after seeing Microsoft’s plan for following years I decided fully focus on Microsoft Technology. I saw first SharePoint which I think sucked. WebServices weren’t interesting either it just felt a bit too hairy for doing simple things. But what I loved was the whole concept of ASP.NET, C# and XML. After seeing XSLT in action I knew this is going to be my language, and it was. Well at least until now. XSLT is really great for templating websites, I gone through many tempalting engines but nothing beats good old XML/XSLT transformations. It is simple and fast. Well, it can get complex sometimes but usually when XSLT gets complex it means you are doing something wrong. Then it’s time to stop and think. Maybe, this is faster in code-behind or perhaps maybe it’s a good idea to write XSL -helper in code-behind for this.

I have to say, I have never come comfortable building sites from .NET controls basically because it was producing bad html markup-up and I don’t have full control how to build html on it but Microsoft has made it better over the time and nowadays it even produces valid mark-up. But still, I have to compile a DLL when making small updates. This is where XSLT rocks!

Because of this, I have waited (.NET 1.1)… and I have waited (.NET 2.0-3.5)… but there hasn’t been XSLT 2.0. Recently I read blog post in XML.com from M. David Peterson Question: Is Microsoft Working On An XSLT 2.0 Processor? Answer I am quoting him who quotes Microsoft XML Team’s WebLog : Chris Lovett Interview

“As for XSLT 2.0 – we’ve heard from customers and understand the improvements in XSLT 2.0 over XSLT 1.0, but right now we’re in the middle of a big strategic investment in LINQ and EDM for the future of the data programming platform which we think will create major improvements in programming against all types of data.”

DAMN!

Bad news for me… Now with all MVC/LINQ/WEB2.0 stuff… Isn’t XML cool anymore?

I finally found out how to do this so it will actually work and I am not loosing data. The trick is creating data first into a flat XML Nodeset and looping this data then to a multicolumn table using following-sibling::item commands. Here is the small sample code for this where I take abstract content structure from the Sitecore to a XML Nodeset <ul><li>xxxxxx</li></ul>.

First let’s make a variable.

<xsl:variable name=”keywords”>
<ul>
<xsl:for-each select=”$keywords”>
<xsl:for-each select=”descendant-or-self::item[(@template='keywords')]“>
<li>
<xsl:value-of select=”sc:fld(‘text’,.)”/>
</li>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:for-each>
</ul>
</xsl:variable>

Then using msxsl:node-set -function (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hz88kef0(vs.71).aspx) I create nodeset out of the XSL variable and loop data to the html table.

<table>
<xsl:for-each select=”msxsl:node-set($keywords)/ul/li[position() mod 3 = 1]“>
<tr>
<td>
<xsl:value-of select=”.”/>
</td>
<xsl:for-each select=”following-sibling::li[position() < 3]“>
<td>
<xsl:value-of select=”.”/>
</td>
</xsl:for-each>
</tr>
</xsl:for-each>
</table>

I would be very keen to know if you have done this in pure XSLT because msxsl:node-set seems to be quite slow.

<xsl:variable name="books">
<book author="Michael Howard">Writing Secure Code</book>
<book author="Michael Kay">XSLT Reference</book>
</xsl:variable>

<authors>
<xsl:for-each select="msxsl:node-set($books)/book">
<author><xsl:value-of select="@author"/)</author>
</xsl:for-each>
</authors>

It will take a long while before we see XSLT 2.0 from Microsoft. Therefore, for anyone who wants to play with XSLT 2.0 and XQuery, download SAXON from Sourceforge. I heard it works nicely with .NET.

XSL Formatting Objects
In 2001 the W3C endorsed an XML formatting language known as XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). XSL-FO is synonymous with eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), one of three recommendations by the W3C’s XSL working group. The three recommendations are 1. XSL Transformations (XSLT), for transforming XML files 2.XML Path Language (XPath), for defining parts of an XML document 3. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), or XSL-FO, for XML formatting information

XSL-FO is an intermediate form that results from applying an XSLT style sheet to an XML structured document. The XML-FO form describes how pages appear when presented to a reader, such as a Web browser. Currently, there are no readers that directly interpret an XSL-FO document. To interpret them, you must run them through a formatter, along with other data, such as graphics and font metrics, to create a final displayable or printable file. Possible formats for the resulting file include Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

When compared to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), XSL-FO provides a more sophisticated visual layout model. You can use CSS to apply specific style elements to an XML or HTML document. By contrast, XSL-FO is a language for describing a complete document. It includes everything needed to paginate and format a document. Some of the formatting supported by XSL-FO, but not by CSS, includes right-to-left and top-to-bottom text, footnotes, margin notes, page numbers in cross-references, and more. Note that while CSS is primarily intended for use on the Web, XSL-FO is designed for broader use. As an example, you could use an XSL-FO document to lay out an XML document as a printed book. You could write a completely separate XSL-FO document to transform the same XML document into HTML.

Maybe this will boost XSL-FO as a technology on .NET world forward. It has been a shame that XSL-FO hasn’t got popularity even though it’s a very

Of course you could use an extension function such as http://www.exslt.org/dyn/functions/evaluate/ to change string to nodeset for dynamic xml lookup.

I have been working last months on group calendaring application and there I have face huge problems with dates. How to format dates on XSLT? Version 1.0 of XSLT doesn?t support sorting dates using the xsl:sort tag. This can present a problem since dates frequently play an important role in my calendar application. Now I just need to figured out how this one work. ?