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COPYRIGHT 2006 Information Today, Inc.
YOU may already be familiar with the open standard known as eXtensible Markup Language, or XML [http://www.w3c.org/xml], which provides tools to preserve metadata, or data about the data. An analogous example is the library catalog, which provides information about a book but not the actual book. The eXtensible Stylesheet Language: Transformations (XSLT), which provides tools to query the data and metadata within XML documents, may not be so familiar. XSLT also provides tools to impose business rules on the XML document. It's the genie inside the bottle. Because business rules are subjective, the success of XML/XSLT is firmly rooted in the careful management of human capital. All stakeholders, particularly topic experts and programmers, must be involved in every phase of the process. Negotiating among differing viewpoints to obtain consensus requires skill, patience, and resources. However, as quality guru W. Edwards Deming believed, quality should be built into every phase of the process, not tacked on at the end.
This article focuses on using XSLT to query XML documents. One great advantage to XML-based tools rests on the fact that XML is text-based. There is no unreadable compiled code underneath. Because it is "human readable," XML can be accessed by the nonprogrammer topic expert much more successfully. For those of you who are not programmers, I hope you will agree that while you may not be able to write an application tomorrow, XML presents a much more user-friendly format that allows the topic expert to truly interact with the programming activities, not just stand on the sidelines and hope the program is doing what the topic expert believes it is doing.
To release the power of the genie, all you really need to know is that a tag ( information ) is how XML provides meaning to the data within the XML document. All these pieces racing around can create some very useful tools. Think of the XML tags as train tracks and train cars, capable of a great deal of work but in need of a destination. The XSLT tags are the train operators' instruction sets. Moving this tag to that location and interacting with some other tags there is analogous to joining other cars and/or leaving cars behind. Finally, stacked onto the train system is cargo and passengers (the topic experts' data).
DON'T RUB IT THE WRONG WAY
A final note--I think that buying...
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