XSLT throughout the document lifecycle
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Track: Core Technologies, Deploying XML, Publishing
Audience Level: High Level/Technical view
Time: Thursday, November 17 09:00
Keywords: Workflow, XSLT, Content Management, Metadata
Abstract:
Originally and primarily, of course, XSLT is designed to fit within the “production” phase of certain kinds of electronic media. A text has been prepared for publication; the outcome of this process, in the classic paradigm, is XML; XSLT is used to convert this “source document” to an output format such as HTML or PDF. From the time of the release of XSLT 1.0 in 1999, however, XSLT has been used for much more than the simple case of rendering documents that are fully-edited and “good to go”. For example, two years ago at XML2003, I showed how XSLT stylesheets can be applied to semi-automate some of the more laborious aspects of copy editing, proof-reading and fact checking.
More broadly, XSLT applications within the document lifecycle can be divided between pure XSLT applications, in which an XSLT engine is the main processor and its output will be used directly, and “ancillary” or “supporting” XSLT applications, in which XSLT is used to enhance the functionality of another tool. If the latter sort of XSLT is included, these various applications include (but are not limited to) the following: for micro-publication (internal pre-publication; peer review); for extra-schema validation; for data aggregation and filtering, for example, generating indexes to a set of documents or collecting a set of metadata; in support of schema technologies (schema documentation, profiling); in CM systems (both open-source and proprietary CM and data-federation systems increasingly support XSLT queries and aggregation); and for task organization and configuration (e.g. XSLT can be used with Ant for task management/automation).
In many cases, these applications are possible due to the “network effects” of bringing XML technologies in general into workflow management. For example, it is now considered routine to generate file listings in XML (there are free toolkits available, such as XML Starlet, that can provide just this sort of low-level function) -- not because XML is so great in itself, but because XSLT can then be used to program innumerable “file-wrangling” sorts of chores. A tool like Apache Ant, which uses XML to configure many jobs that might otherwise be done by shell scripts (or by hand), can be enhanced with XSLT to provide dynamic processes like copying all the graphics referenced by a given document from an archive into a working directory.
