Data Binding with XSL

francoisfaubert — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:43:17 +0000

I almost thought I had found something incredible when I first began playing with XSL. When you read the tutorials you can’t help but get lost in your dreams of unexpected power. For once (and without any database) you can have easy access to sorted information throughout a static website.

But when you read more closely, you learn that Internet Explorer 5 doesn’t support this w3c recommendation. Ah well, no surprises there but that was enough to stop me from using it for a project at work. However, it does work in the recent standards-compliant browsers –- I know IE6 doesn’t naturally fit in that category, but he still understands XSL.

The simplest method I could find of using XSL was to combine it with JavaScript. It causes a major slowdown, but at least you make sure your XML content is outputted properly. You easily can use ASP as well, but when you have access to ASP you probably also have a database available and shouldn’t be wasting your time with XSL for data binding.

There’s one thing I couldn’t find an answer for however. Even after reading through the XSL homepage on the w3c, it’s still not quite clear if it’s semantically correct to use XSL for data binding… I think it is because the tutorials all seem to point that way, but I can never understand anything on that website

Francois Faubert » XSL

Data Binding with XSL