Pattern Matching - XML tutorial

Category: XML tutorials > Style Sheets - Difficulty:

In this tutorial, you'll learn: more details about the XSLT style sheet language; process and sort nodes in an XSLT style sheet; use patterns and expressions in XSLT; apply XSLT style sheets to more challenging document transformation tasks

Constructing result tree fragments.

Fortunately, due to its relative simplicity, there are no optical illusions associated with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets); all of the visual "trickery" in CSS is made possible with clear and concise style properties. CSS allows you to attach formatting styles to individual elements within an XML document. These styles are then used to determine how the elements in the document are rendered for display within a web browser. Even though the XML language doesn't inherently include any mechanism for defining how a document looks, CSS makes it possible to add a view to XML documents.
In this tutorial, you'll learn
- The basic structure and syntax of CSS
- How to create a basic CSS style sheet for an existing XML document
- How to control the layering of elements with CSS
- How to use margins and padding to control the spacing around and within elements
- How to format text using several different CSS style properties

This tutorial explores a feature of Google's search engine called Google Sitemaps, which allows Web developers to automatically notify Google of changes in web page content so that Google can know that the pages exist, as well as indexing the pages more frequently. Of course, Google Sitemaps uses XML or I wouldn't be bothering to tell you about it. It represents a clever and efficient use of XML that serves as an important tool in any Web developer's toolkit.

In this tutorial, selected XML features are demonstrated on many examples which can be downloaded for off-line use.