Gallery of Stupid XSL and XSLT Tricks

A Stupid XSL/XSLT Trick is a use of XSL/XSLT for something unusual or amusing for which it wasn't necessarily designed.

Let charlie@IncrementalDevelopment.com know about your XSL/XSLT tricks to and they will be put on proud display (or linked to), properly accredited, in this area.

Bob Copeland

Bob Copeland implemented a square root routine in XSLT:

• Compute square roots using the Babylonian method.

He comments:

It would be interesting though if someone put together a set of stylesheets implementing a standard math library, e.g. including the trig functions via log tables or Taylor series. Because you never know when you'll need to compute an arctan while generating XML documents.

Mike Edwards

Mike Edwards thinks he saw another version of this idea somewhere. I know I've suggested that someone try it. And now here it is:

• Solve the Towers of Hanoi problem with XSLT.

David Caveney

David Caveney, of OmniSphere, has used XSLT to implement feature-based code generation:

• Feature-based code generation with XSLT.

Bob Lyons

Bob Lyons, of Unidex, has proved XSLT capable of computing anything by:

• Building a universal Turing machine in XSLT.

Joel Aufgang

Joel Aufgang, of Agile, has used XSLT to create fractals:

• Create a fractal Sierpinsky triangle.

Rick Jelliffe

Rick Jelliffe provided one of the inspirations for this gallery:

• Use XSLT as a validation language.
• This above idea has been put into very practical use with The Schematron.

Francis Norton

Francis Norton used XSLT to generate a validator (expressed in XSLT):

• Generate XSLT that does schema validation.

Charlie Halpern-Hamu

The first three are from the paper presented at Markup Technologies '99:

• Transform a schema to a sample instance.
• Transform a sample instance to a schema.
• Differentiate a simple polynomial function.

• Quine: Transform any input to a copy of the stylesheet itself. See Oliver's approaches below.

Oliver Becker

These were created by Oliver Becker, Department of Computer Science, Humboldt University Berlin:

• Format XML in HTML verbatim with syntax highlighting.
• Compute prime numbers using the sieve of Eratosthenes.
• Translate iteration elements inside of stylesheets into recursive XSLT template calls.
• Merge two XML documents.
• Quine: Transform any input to a copy of the stylesheet itself. Oliver presents a true Quine and a cheat.

Chris Rathman

Chris Rathman explains: "I have been studying a bunch of programming languages of late and have used the Object Oriented Shape example on Jim Weirich's page as a kind of sample problem for a lot of different languages."

• Object oriented programming in XSLT. This stylesheet does use one non-standard feature that's found in Saxon: node-set. My [Charlie's] understanding is that this feature is likely to be included in a future for version of XSLT.
• Factorial function as a demonstration of recursion.
• Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer. Just in case you forgot the lyrics.

Jean-Marc Vanel

Jean-Marc Vanel maintains a collection of useful XSLT transforms, models and reusable fragments under GPL. These have been developed as part of the Worlwide Botanical Knowledge Base project.

Josh Lubell

Josh Lubell, at NIST, is developing an XSLT toolbox. This toolbox currently contains:

• APEX, which implements a simple subset HyTime architectural forms adapted to XML.
• ATTS, for assigning default attribute values to XML documents.

Muhammad Athar Parvez

Muhammad Athar Parvez, Ruksun Software Tech in Poona, India, has developed a calendar generator:

• Generate a month calendar given a title, starting day and number of days.