Hello to all,

I have been trying to learn about the formation of XSLT online, but have come across a wide variety of individual tutorials, comment and opinions as to how to form an XSLT document to translate ax XML to xHTML.

I understand the basics, but when it comes to coding I can not get any results. Below is the a brief breakdown of the XML code (and below is my XSLT code from what info I have gathered on the net):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="final.xsl"?>
<myPage>
    <name>My Web Page</name>
    <navLinks>
        <link title="Home">index.html</link>
        <link title="View all our products">products.html</link>
        <link title="About our company">about.html</link>
        <link title="Contact Us">contact.html</link>
    </navLinks>
    <content>
        <head1>Welcome to our company site</head1>
        <head2>Shepherd Neame Master Brewers</head2>
        <data>
            <item>Our traditions can be traced back to the foundation of our brewery in 1698 - with strong links to the town of Faversham and the local community many years before - and our commercial expertise is enhanced by 21st century production and distribution facilities.</item>
...
        </data>
        <foot>Thanks to Shepherd Neame Master Brewers for the content for this assignment.</foot>
    </content>
</myPage>

XSLT code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<?xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"?>
<xsl:output method="html" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<title><xsl:value-of select="head1"/></title>
<div id="container"><xsl:value-of select="myPage"/></div>
    <div id="header"><xsl:value-of select="name"/></div>
        <div id="navBar"><xsl:value-of select="navLinks"/>

             <a href="index.html"><xsl:value-of select="link"/>Home</a><br/>
            <a href="products.html">View all our products</a><br/>
            <a href="about.html">About our company</a><br/>
            <a href="contact.html">Contact Us</a><br/>
        </div>
        <div id="mainContent"><xsl:value-of select="content"/>
            <h1><xsl:value-of select="head1"/></h1>
            <h2><xsl:value-of select="head1"/></h2>
                <div id="paraGraphs"><xsl:value-of select="data"/>
                <p><xsl:value-of select="item"/></p>
        </div>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>


Message continued:
 Am I missing something? Am I way off base? The one section I am unclear about mainly is the creation a link from using the variables used in the XML doc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, eh?

This site isn't provided in order to sell books, but it is provided to offer follow-up help to people who buy books. Personally, when learning a new programming language the first thing I always do is to find a good book on the subject and read it cover to cover.

The main concept you seem to have missed is that of context. A path expression such as "title" selects nodes relative to a context node, and it won't select anything unless it's used in the correct context.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

'faberd':

What Michael is telling you: Your XPATHs are all wrong.

When you did: <xsl:template match="/"> your value-of select="xxx" statements have to use an XPATH relative to "/" where an XPATH is placed in xxx.

For example, when you did:

<title><xsl:value-of select="head1"/></title>

try

<title><xsl:value-of select="/myPage/content/head1"/></title>

Also, write your XSL in stages, in your XSL, I would comment everything from "<div" to the last "</div>" and check that at-least your title is getting populated.

I appreciate that when given a task with tight time constraints we are not always given the luxury of reading a book from cover to cover. Having referred to Michael's book as a reference, I can tell you that the Holy Bible is less verbose.

For quick answers check-out:
http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XSLTutorial/Output/index.html

Good luck,

Lloyd