writing your own website XSLT

the core function of rapple is to process HTML sources files and generate styled XHTML output. this guide assumes that you have installed and configured rapple for your needs and that you have a basic understanding of its usage. it is also assumes that you have a working familiarity with XML and in particular with XSLT.

the first step to using rapple for a production website is to design an XSLT template for the site. several example templates are available in the resources module of the project CVS to inspire you but they all follow the same basic principles. the important points are that:

• the XSLT is XHTML aware (note the xhtml namespace);
• that the output settings are appropriate (see the output method);
• and that the stylesheet expects a "host" parameter.

the "host" parameter refers to domain hosting the website (e.g., http://localhost/) and is stored in the rapple configuration file. this parameter can be referenced as $host within templates thereby insulating the XSLT from changes (e.g., after building a local test website you might wish to generate a production site on a different host - once testing is complete it suffices to change the entry in the configuration file).

the following example outlines the basic structure of the XSLT file:

the real work is done within the root template which is responsible for generating the output. one popular "design pattern" is to fill-in-the-blanks. in the example below a simple XHTML page is generated by extracting the title from the source document (resolving the CSS file against the host) and performing a shallow copy of the source contents into the output.

using the above approach additional elements can be added to the root template to transform the output. for example footers and headers can be applied either side of the apply-templates call on "xhtml:html/xhtml:body/*" or a menu system can be inserted in a sidebar. in fact it is possible to introduce many interesting features to this design using pure XSLT solutions. for example see the context sensitive highlighting for a discussion on how to generate context sensitive menus.

as you progress you may wish to incorporate external features into your XSLT using the xsl:include directive. includes can be used to support:

• definition of global variables to be used by XSLT (e.g., see librapple.conf.xsl);
• definition of attribute sets used to define default settings on output elements;
• exposure of "library" templates used across several stylesheets (e.g., see librapple.xsl).

the xsl:include directive is a top level directive and must therefore be included just after xsl:stylesheet.

note: in the case of the sablotron xslt processor is it necessary to provide the absolute path of the included stylesheet and to preceed it with the "file://" protocol (see faq for details).