Design Techniques
XSL: Extensible Stylesheet Language
XSL files are the key to presenting XML content. The name "Stylesheet Language" is a little confusing as it's not really used for laying out the content or even formatting it. XSL is a transformation language that takes a set of content or data and transforms it into something else.
Using XSL is very similar to using templates in that they contain all the definitions for converting XML elements to another format (eg. XHTML). This site, for example, has XSL files defining the different interfaces (1 XSL for each), the general layout styles (ie. p, h1, strong etc) and one for the navigation menus. This separation makes it more obvious where any given definition is (as these files can get quite large) and allows for more detailed definitions.
If that is all sounding like the domain of programmers, fear not because, if you have some some knowledge of HTML and are tired of labouring away on individual pages, XSL files are remarkably simple to use and are going to make your day.
The tutorials below outline some of the basic uses of XSL and are hopefully pretty simple to follow.
