Extensible Stylesheet Language Transmogrifications
Now that the Mini is up and running, I’ve got to get jiggy with XML transformations using XSL. I’ve dabbled in this before and have even bought a book, but being as busy as I am I usually never get to the books I buy until I actually have to use the technology featured in said book.
XSL is really pretty simple. You have to be able to use XPath syntax, but that’s not that big a deal. W3Schools.com is your friend. Fortunately the Mini comes with default XSLT that you can edit. Trust me, this is a good thing, because it wasn’t until after I looked at the default stylesheet that I realized two things:
- I’m a real amateur at XSLT. What I don’t know about XSLT would fill a small country, larger than Luxembourg but smaller than Madagascar.
- There was quite a bit I hadn’t even considered having to process. Search within results pages, advanced search pages, etc.
The great thing is that the Google people do some things with XSLT that I hadn’t even considered possible (or necessary). They manage to provide a very modular approach to the stylesheet that makes modification and extension of the code very simple.
Them Google folks, they know their bidness.
