LinLog

Today I finally got around to learning a bit of XSLT. It's one of those things that's been on my list for a while, but I just never really had need for it before.

Well, since I converted LnBlog's data files to actual XML last week (it's about freaking time), I figured I'd experiment with displaying the entries without any server-side processing. To that end, I went through the W3 Schools tutorial and tested out a couple of XSL stylesheets to see how it works. I probably won't actually do entry display that way, but it seemed like an interesting experiment.

What I may actually use XSL for is RSS feeds. You know, so I can get that cool "my feed is a web page" thing like FeedBurner has. The only problem I had on that was getting my entry text to display as HTML. For some reason, when I try to loop through the channel items, Opera displays the HTML is the descriptions shows as raw HTML code. Doesn't seem to matter whether the entities are escaped or the whole thing is enclosed in a CDATA block. I guess I'll need to do some actual studying to figure that one out. Who'd have guessed?