New Formats
Besides modifying existing XSLT, you can also author entirely new XSLT stylesheets. You can author new stylesheets using the following steps:
1. Author a sample of the intended output format. For example, use an HTML editor to produce a sample of the intended format; create a sample document in Microsoft Office and save it as HTML (this is how the Microsoft Word-based HTML formats were created); or export an Adobe Illustrator drawing as SVG.
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The use of Apache Batik, as described in the various chart.xsl stylesheets (see the table in the section on Stylesheets Provided earlier in this chapter), provides an alternative means of producing SVG with minimal knowledge of XSLT. |
2. Copy static pieces of the sample output to a skeleton XSLT stylesheet, editing or escaping them as necessary to ensure that they are well-formed XML. (All XSLT must be well-formed XML.)
3. Author XSLT to transform the input XML into the dynamic portions of the output, using the sample output as a guide.
The number and complexity of transformations to be done in step 3 can vary greatly from one format to another and largely determine the effort involved in creating a new format. XSLT provides extensive capabilities for sorting, filtering, summing, and combining XML data. Additionally, you can provide XSLT extension functions and elements that call other languages, including Java and JavaScript. See the Saxon documentation for further details.
