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There are many ways to display XML. One of the major initiatives is the XML Stylesheet
Language (XSL).
Part III
of this book goes into more details about XSL, but for now,
suffice it to say that XSL is another open standard under consideration by the W3C. It is
specifically devoted to displaying XML and, therefore, is simpler and more powerful than
other ways of displaying XML data. XSL gives you the ability to manipulate the data (for
example, sorting or selective display), at the same time letting you format it using syntax
similar to HTML.
Other ways of displaying XML data include using somewhat traditional techniques
(anything that is more than two years old in the computer world is considered traditional)
like Dynamic HTML
(DHTML) with Cascading Stylesheets
(CSS) and many new
initiatives with even longer acronyms. XSL, however, is likely to emerge as the dominant
way to display XML content.
The key advantage to displaying data with XSL—or any other initiative—is that you can
display the same information in many ways without having to make a call to the server to
generate a view for you. If the data is in XML, clients can choose whether they want to
view it as a table, a bulleted list, a pie chart, or even in a different language! Figure 1.6
illustrates this feature.
