another quick question

andyhague · March 21st, 2006, 10:53 AM

Hi, I am trying to convert an XML file into a web page using XSLT and CSS. I have successfully converted the XML information into the correct order using an XSL file and now need to change fonts, sizes etc, using the CSS file. I am having problems with making the CSS file alter the layout as I am not quite sure where I should reference the CSS file. Should it be in the XML file or the XSL file. If I put the following line of code in the <body> tag of the XSL file then it allows me to alter the font,size of <h1>, <h2>.

<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='testpage.css'></link>

I was however wanting to group the CSS statements by the nodes in the XML file so that the 'News' nodes would have one type of formatting and 'About' nodes would have another.

I see this can be done using news {} and about {} in examples, but it will not work for me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

p.s. I have tried putting <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="testpage.css"?> after the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
line in my XML file, but it did not work.

mhkay · March 21st, 2006, 11:47 AM

The XML file is transformed into an HTML document by your XSLT stylesheet; then the HTML document is displayed by the browser more-or-less exactly as if it had downloaded the HTML document directly.

So the reference to the CSS stylesheet belongs in the HTML document that you generate, not in the XSLT or in the original XML.

As for creating finer-grained references to CSS statements, I think that's an HTML question rather than an XSLT question. If you can work out how to do it in HTML, then it shouldn't be a problem to write the XSLT code to produce it. Turning that around, if you don't know what HTML you want to generate, then it's hard to write the XSLT code to produce it.

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

andyhague · March 21st, 2006, 12:13 PM

Cheers Micheal,

I think I was getting confused before as I had seen a CSS file applied to an XML file directly, without any transition using an XSLT file. When I was trying to make reference to the nodes in my CSS file, the file had no knowledge about the nodes, as it was dealing with the HTML that the XSLT file had produced and not the original XML file.

Thanks for clearing that up.