Producing HTML tables with XSLT

Since it was requested, and it’s one of my favorite topics, I figured that I should hit this topic.  For those of you that have seen some of my posts on GDN, you may have seen this before.

XSLT is a very hard language to learn because it is not a procedural language (which most programmers are familiar with), but a functional programming language (like LISP).  In my journeys I’ve run across a really good article by David McKelvie of Edinburgh University called Producing HTML Tables with XSLT.  For anyone that is having a hard time learning XSLT, this is a must read.  David does an excellent job walking you through the natural progress most people go thru when learning to switch from procedural programming to functional programming.  He doesn’t just tell you the final solution, but goes through the different steps he went through to get there.  My only (slight) compliant is the use of the XSLT for-each statement instead of the more pure apply-templates, but that is a really minor issue.

Don XML