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- If you're unfamiliar with XML, start with the many helpful resources in the developerWorks New to XML page, including Doug Tidwell's popular Introduction to XML tutorial (August 2002).
- Learn the basics of CSS and CSS with XML. See the first tutorial in this series Use Cascading Stylesheets to display XML, Part 1, including the Resources panels of that tutorial, to get started. This tutorial introduces the use of CSS to style XML in browsers (November 2004).
- Continue with Use Cascading Stylesheets to display XML, Part 2, which covers advanced topics for the use of CSS to style XML in browsers (February 2005).
- If you're unfamiliar with XSLT, take a look at Get started with XPath by Bertrand Portier (May 2004), move on to Investigating XSLT: The XML transformation language by LindaMay Patterson (August 2001), and finish up your introductory tour with Create multi-purpose Web content with XSLT by Nicholas Chase (March 2003).
- While you're at it, bookmark the W3C's XSL reference page.
- Also see Adding a touch of style, a great introduction to CSS by Dave Raggett of the W3C. The W3C staff (Bert Bos to be specific) also wrote How to add style to XML, a sketchy introduction, but with some useful examples.
- Follow along by running the tutorial examples yourself. The author tested the CSS in this tutorial with Firefox, a popular and free Web browser that's available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other platforms. Firefox is based on Mozilla's rendering engine, which has always been regarded as a very CSS-compliant browser. He used 4Suite 1.0b1 as the stand-alone XSLT processor.
- Bookmark and refer to the formal CSS 2 specification, Cascading Style Sheets, level 2: CSS2 Specification. Many parts of the specification are clear and readable.
- Keep an eye on developments in CSS 3, the next version of CSS. Many browsers already experimentally implement features proposed on CSS 3 working drafts. Read CSS 3 Selectors by Russell Dyer for a good overview of the selectors (though CSS 3 is more than just new selectors). But before CSS 3 is complete, you can expect to see CSS 2.1, a minor update.
- Review Associating Style Sheets with XML documents Version 1.0 (W3C Recommendation, June 1999), which is the most authoritative document that describes how to specify style for XML documents.
- For an overview of push versus pull XSLT
techniques, see this
article.
- To get started with EXSLT, see Uche Ogbuji's article EXSLT by example (developerWorks, February 2003). Particularly relevant for this tutorial is The exsl:document element.
- Take a closer look at Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) with the developerWorks tutorials Introduction to Scalable Vector Graphics (March 2004) and Interactive, dynamic Scalable Vector Graphics (June 2003), both by Nicholas Chase.
- For more on the XSLT lookup tables approach, see Uche Ogbuji's tip Packaging XSLT lookup tables as EXSLT functions (developerWorks, January 2005), and work backwards through resources posted there.
- Refer to Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Style Specification (W3C Recommendation, November 2000), which details how CSS can be processed using DOM (for example, through JavaScript in a browser). Mozilla has excellent DOM and CSS references. See, for example, the Gecko DOM Reference (Gecko is Mozilla's rendering engine). And in case you run into problems, bookmark the Mozilla XSLT FAQ.
- Use the W3C CSS Validation Service, "a free service that checks Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in (X)HTML documents or standalone for conformance to W3C recommendations."
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Browse for books on these and other technical topics.
- Find more XML and Web development resources on the developerWorks XML and Web architecture zones.
- Finally, find out how you can become an IBM Certified Developer in XML and related technologies.
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