Learn about XSLT pages
Learn about XSLT pages
When working with server-side XSL transformations, you can use Dreamweaver to create XSLT pages that generate full HTML documents (entire XSLT pages), or XSLT fragments that generate a portion of an HTML document.
An entire XSLT page is similar to a regular HTML page. It contains a <body> tag and a <head> tag, and lets you display a combination of HTML and XML data on the page. An XSLT fragment is a piece of code, used by a separate document, that displays formatted XML data. Unlike an entire XSLT page, it is an independent file that contains no <body> or <head> tag.
If you want to display XML data on a page of its own, you would create an entire XSLT page, and bind your XML data to it. If, on the other hand, you wanted to display XML data in a particular section of an existing dynamic page--for example, a dynamic home page for a sporting goods store, with sports scores from an RSS feed displayed on one side of the page--you would create an XSLT fragment and insert a reference to it in the dynamic page. Creating XSLT fragments, and using them in conjunction with other dynamic pages to display XML data is the more common scenario when working with server-side transformations.
In this tutorial, you’ll create an entire XSLT page and use it to transform a sample XML file. The transformation will be a client-side transformation that uses a modern browser (Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 8, Mozilla 1.8, or Firefox 1.0.2). Server-side transformations are beyond the scope of this tutorial as they require that you have an application server configured with a transformation engine.
For a comprehensive overview of server-side and client-side XSL transformations, see About server-side XSL transformations and About client-side XSL transformations in Using Dreamweaver (Help > Using Dreamweaver).
For additional resources, including tutorials that teach you more about server-side transformations, see www.macromedia.com/go/dw_xsl.
 |  |
