XSLT before/after example

XML has become a major technology for organizations who need to share data between often disparate applications.

Many web developers are familiar with what an XML file looks like. In fact, many of these developers probably uses XML to store within their application and/or transfer data to another (perhaps remote) application.

Despite this, many developers are unaware of how these XML documents can be transformed using XSLT.

XSLT (which stands for Extensible Styles Language Transformations) allows you to transform the contents of your XML document so that they look more presentable. For example, you could use XSLT to output the contents into an HTML table. Or, you could simply use XSLT to apply some CSS so that it just looks different (and you can lose those XML tags if you like!)

Quackit's XSLT tutorial (which is part of the larger XML tutorial) contains a simple XSLT example. From there, you can follow the XSLT tutorial through to see how you can transform your XML documents using the various XSLT tags.

Hopefully, it might get you thinking about how XSLT could benefit your own applications and web development.