XSLT and Cross Site Stylesheets

Filed Under: MT Carbon, Journal.

With both the ideas and a bit of encouragement from Dave Shea at mezzoblue.com, I’m embarking on a nifty little project. One, that I should mention is being explored by a number of individuals.

First, I should mention Dave’s post on the subject. He earlier tried making some of the CSS Zen Garden designs carry the content of his site - which, mind you, is not such an easy task. Later, a post from a fellow with the alias, “forgetfoo” pointed me to a little experiment he was working on. Enter the Openblog (requires IE6 or Mozilla 1.4+), a fascinating demonstration of the design/layout capabilities of XSLT.

So, I’m thinking. Why can’t I output Movabletype data into XML templates, then merge the XML documents with interchangable XSLT stylesheets. Linked to these stylesheets, of course, would be CSS metadata.

In this regard, various weblogs/personal sites could output to a standard XML document or RSS feed. At a central repository, they could be given the chance to download “themes” for their websites. These themes would be created using both XSL and CSS data. This might aide other designers in adopting semantically accurate XHTML and CSS, and also provide a way for some website/weblog owners to implement nice layouts without the need for great design skills. In addition, end users could even apply such “themes” to corporate/commercial/organizational sites they may frequent for common sorts of information.

I just installed apache, php and an XSLT/XML parser on my workstation, and I’m ready to learn some new code! Perhaps a trip to the bookstore is warranted tomorrow.

Published: 5 years, 3 months ago