XSL: Characteristics, Status and Potentials for the Humanities

Wendell Piez

Mulberry Technologies, Inc.

At ALLC / ACH 2000 at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, I presented a paper providing a succinct overview of XSL, with particular attention to XSLT applications for Humanities text encoding projects.

Following these links to the paper, please find a listing of some XSL resources, current as of July, 2000.

• HTML Presentation version
  • Includes demonstration files linked from the paper
• PDF printable version (including exhibits; requires Adobe Acrobat)
  • For 8.5" x 11" paper (US Letter size)
  • For A4 paper
• Exhibits only (A4 only -- sorry)
• I also have available on request, a package of some TEI XSLT implementations, including
  • My demonstration sample file, a TEI-Lite version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1831 edition);
  • XSLT stylesheets used to create an HTML browsable version of this text (or similar TEI texts);
  • A TEI to COCOA format converter, useful to users of the TACT or OCP text-analysis programs;
  • An XSLT text concordancer for use on Frankenstein (locates search strings in the novel);
  • A TEI to SVG transformer used to graph hits in the novel on a search string (that is, produces a frequency distribution graph.
  If you'd like the .zip file, please send me e-mail.

Some XSL Resources

• Mulberry Technologies, Inc.'s XSLT Quick Reference (a crib sheet in PDF format)
• Michael Kay's SAXON, the processor I've been using lately (though it's not the only one I like). Kay's book XSLT: A Programmer's Reference (Wrox, 2000) is also the best book to date on the subject (and not likely to be outdone soon).
• Specification documents (the final authority):
  • XPath
  • XSLT
• XSLinfo.com, a good portal for XSL and related technologies