This tutorial takes you through the steps of creating an XSLT page and 

performing a client side transformation (mainly because the client side 

workflow is much easier to execute, and doesn't require the use of an 

application server.) For more information about other ways to deploy 

XSLT pages, see 

 Learn about other deployment options  on page 194

.

Learn about XSLT pages

When working with server side XSL transformations, you can use 

Dreamweaver to create XSLT pages that generate full HTML documents 

(entire XSLT pages), or XSLT fragments that generate a portion of an 

HTML document.

An entire XSLT page is similar to a regular HTML page. It contains a 

 tag and a 

 tag, and lets you display a combination of 

HTML and XML data on the page. An XSLT fragment is a piece of code, 

used by a separate document, that displays formatted XML data. Unlike an 

entire XSLT page, it is an independent file that contains no 

 or 

 tag. 

If you want to display XML data on a page of its own, you would create an 

entire XSLT page, and bind your XML data to it. If, on the other hand, 

you wanted to display XML data in a particular section of an existing 

dynamic page for example, a dynamic home page for a sporting goods 

store, with sports scores from an RSS feed displayed on one side of the 

page you would create an XSLT fragment and insert a reference to it in 

the dynamic page. Creating XSLT fragments, and using them in 

conjunction with other dynamic pages to display XML data is the more 

common scenario when working with server side transformations.

In this tutorial, you'll create an entire XSLT page and use it to transform a 

sample XML file. The transformation will be a client side transformation 

that uses a modern browser (Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 8, Mozilla 1.8, 

or Firefox 1.0.2). Server side transformations are beyond the scope of this 

tutorial as they require that you have an application server configured with 

a transformation engine.

For a comprehensive overview of server side and client side XSL 

transformations, see  About server side XSL transformations  and  About 

client side XSL transformations  in Using Dreamweaver (Help > Using 

Dreamweaver).

178 Tutorial: Displaying XML Data