TheReg and XSLT publishing

The Register is among the News site I look at from time to time, and I noticed beginning of this week that the format changed. I then later discovered that they are using libxslt to build the pages. I loved the following statement "We're proud that The Register uses valid XHTML and CSS on its pages" with the suggestion to report breakages. Even if TheReg specializes in treating the topics in an sensational way, their technical attitude should be noted too :-)

In general the [Database ->] XML -> XHTML processing though XSLT seems one of the best way to generate well-formed and even valid XHTML, and as long as the transformation is either static or cached, the cost for doing so is reasonable. The full xmlsoft.org site is generated that way, the pages are XSLT produced by the Makefile in libxml2 (and libxslt) doc directory, and also validated against XHTML1 DTDs (which are in the catalog if you installed the xhtml1 RPM) automatically. That way I'm sure that even if the doc content might not be ideal and certainly outdated it's structure and presentation at least are garanteed to be clean.

Formatting

sdodji pointed me at Prince an XML formatter using CSS for the rules and generating PDF and Postscript, which uses libxml2. I tend to agree with him that if commercial implementation are developped then that means that there is a need for such formatter and the Open Source community work like libcroco and sewfox may have a bright future. I just hope that the xmlroff project will continue too, I'm not sure Sun is still actively supporting the project. Formatting is hard but we have most of the infrastructure, maybe aiming at the full XSL is just too hard and a CSS based tool is more likely to get finished, well I hope so.