XSLT: Style Free Style Sheets

Eric van der Vlist, a writer for xmlhack and XML.com, spoke about "Style Free" XSLT, the purpose of which is to separate data from application logic and also from presentation. It was his opinion that permitting presentation information in XSLT creates problems. He gave the example of a French XML web site, <XML>fr, to illustrate the problem:

source.xml + style.xslt = page.html

The solution is to replace style.xslt with a layout.xml piece for generic structure of the page and also a logic.xslt for the processing.

source.xml + layout.xml + logic.xslt = page.html

But this wasn't sufficient when you need to completely separate the presentation from the data. He tried creating a spec-layout.xml to define a specific part of the page.

spec-layout.xml + content.xml + layout.xml + logic2.xslt = page.html

Code that implements this can be downloaded from 4xt.org.

Readers interested in XSLT might want to check out the OASIS XSLT/XPath Conformance effort, chaired by Ken Holman, who offers extensive XSLT/XPath training.

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