[XML-SIG] xsl transforms for displaying XML in a browser

Dave Kuhlman dkuhlman at cutter.rexx.com
Sat Oct 2 02:19:44 CEST 2004


On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 05:12:49PM -0400, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> I did try the lazy route.  The default XML display is just not good
> enough.  Pretty printed XML is too cluttered and a simple text extract
> just runs on.  Essentially I need to add some labels, blocking, and
> breaks into the text stream.  I'll simply write it out.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 16:52, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> > Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> > > I have a rather complicated (100 tags) XML file that needs to get 
> > > displayed sensibly in a browser.  I've started writing the XSL to 
> > > transform the document to html.  (CSS is too simple and the XML file 
> > > needs to be readable for people without requiring special software.)
> > > 
> > > Is there a smart way to do this?  I am thinking of writing a python 
> > > script to simply generate an XSL file with explicit templates for
> > > every tag.  I would then modify this collection of boiler-plate code
> > > to get a reasonable layout.
> > 
> > Well, both Mozilla/Firefox and Internet Explorer already will display
> > pretty good pretty-printed versions.  Maybe you don't need to do 
> > anything special.


Lloyd -

This isn't XSLT, but ...

Have you looked at SciTE.  It's a text editor that can export to
HTML and PDF and several others.  I just tried it on an XML file
and the resulting HTML and PDF look reasonable.

It looks like the exported output is slightly custom-izable.

The generated HTML uses CSS, which it embeds in the HTML output
file.  So you might be able to customize that a bit also.

See:

    http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTE.html

For a little information on customization, see the documentation
and search for ("export.html" and export.pdf") at:

    http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTEDoc.html

Dave


-- 
Dave Kuhlman
http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman


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