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XSLT: Working with XML and HTML
Khun Yee Fung. 2001. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley. [ISBN 0-20171103-6. 442 pages, including index and CD-ROM. $39.95 USD (softcover).] ML (Extensible Markup Language) continues to be a major buzzword in technical communication. At this point, even technical writers who do not use XML probably have at least a rudimentary idea of what it is: essentially a markup language that provides the data structure of a document. However, writers who are not yet using it may wonder what exactly you can do with XML. XSLT Working with XML and HTML provides one answer by furnishing in-depth information about transforming XML documents to HTML using XSLT (XSL Transformations). As Khun Yee Fung explains, "XSLT's original purpose was to transform XML documents to XSL [Extensible Stylesheet Language] documents." XSL is "a language with features that allow you to specify precisely how the output should look." "As defined right now, however, XSLT can do much more. It can also transform to HTML, plain text files, and text files with structures not defined in XML" (p. 6).
This book bills itself as being aimed at the XML novice with no programming background required, and for the most part this does apply; however, many of the concepts discussed in the book are relatively advanced and can be difficult to grasp. Already in this review we are knee deep in acronyms-the material by its nature is full of terminology. The sheer number of terms involved in XSLT and XY_ML may be intimidating to the novice, yet Fung consistently does a good job of explaining and differentiating the terms and acronyms....