This free online course will give you a fundamental understanding of XML and XSLT, and will teach you how to create XML documents and convert them to HTML using XSLT transformations.

Course Prep:

1. Read chapter 2, pages 38 - 56, in the J2EE and XML Development textbook from Manning Publishing Co (free chapter).
2. View the XML and XSLT Overview lecture (also available in pdf format here).

Course Overview:

You'll often encounter systems that need to communicate with each other across the Internet using different operating systems, different computer languages, and different web servers.

XML makes a great neutral communication mechanism because it's just plain old ASCII text that's formatted in a certain format. Any computer language that can read and write text files can work with XML.

There are also times when a hierarchical set of data is requested from a database, and transmitted between systems. XML provides a way to describe hierarchical data in a much more robust manner than comma-delimited formats.

XML describes data but does not normally contain instructions for how the data should be displayed. The display instructions are usually handled by HTML, and XSLT provides a way to convert XML into HTML.

You'll notice that an XSLT document is itself an XML document that provides instructions to an XSLT processor about how to format the resulting HTML. The XSLT processor handles embedding XML data in HTML commands so that a web browser can properly display the data in the desired format.