Can I embed an XML file in HTML without using iFrames?
I want to show XSL-transformed XML(which, is HTML as a result of transformation) as a part of my HTML document. Hope this makes it clearer.
If my description of problem is unclear, please tell me and I will try to explain it more.
You can easily use browser based XSL transformation routines to convert an XML string into an XMLDocument or HTML output that can then be applied into any page element.
The steps could be briefly summarized as:
Load an XML string from a resource (or as the result of an AJAX hit).
Load the XML document into an Xml document object (code differs for Browsers - IE uses the ActiveXObject MSXML - DOMDocument, while Mozilla uses the built-in implementation to create a Document. Chrome on the other hand uses the built-in XmlHttpRequest object as the only available XML document object.)
Load the XSL document similarly and set its arguments.
Transform the XML and obtain output as a string.
Apply the string output to any page element.
Note that the code differs for each browser so it may be simpler to use a public JS framework such as JQuery or Prototype.
You will need to use html entities. For example this is how you would write a name tag
<name>.
More reading here
Related
I'm trying to create a directory for an address book, and I was wondering if it would be possible to create a selectable drop down menu that would pull the contact data from an XML file. The ideal way I would want it is to have all of the names of the contacts in the drop down menu, and when one is selected the rest of the information would pop up above the drop down, such as Address, Phone Number, and Email.
Either use a server-side language such as PHP to extract the data from the XML and insert it into the HTML document, or use AJAX to pull the XML file to the client then use JavaScript to process it and insert it into the DOM.
There should be libraries/frameworks/plugins/whatever available to parse XML using whatever language you need, if you know how to insert stuff into the HTML document (in the case of PHP) or into the DOM (in the case of JavaScript), you can do this easy.
From what I understand you have an XML document. Using XSLT you create an XHTML file from your XML and that you can display in your browser (XHTML is HTML that is conform to XML rules).
If that is the case then, yes, you can make links using XSLT. But the data needs to be in your XML source file and not in some database.
There is an article that describes it: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipxslt/index.html
You could attach an XSL to the XML using something like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="cdcatalog.xsl"?>
... actual XML content...
If applying the XSL on the XML outputs an HTML page with JavaScript, you can get the actual result.
Outputting JavaScript is a bit of a pain because of character escaping but it can be done.
I am currently studying ways to present transformed xml files in browsers. My experience with this is minimal, so a number of questions pop up.
I have a transformation test.xslt which transforms input xml to html, and an input file test.xml containing
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="test.xslt" ?>
<root>...</root>
which, when opened in IE9, neatly displays the transformed xml contained above in the root element.
Question 1
Is there a processing instruction or similar available to include the source xml into the xml to be opened, somewhat like the following:
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="test.xslt" ?>
<... instruction to include source file data.xml>
Question 2
The file opened has extension xml. Is there a way to change file contents so it is valid html, allowing the file to be saved with extension html, so that when opened, the default browser will be selected (simply changing extension to html obviously does not have the desired effect so some structural change is necessary) ?
Question 3
My goal is to query a db to get the data to be parsed by the xslt code. What is the best way to do this (no problem if this includes javascript)?
Question 4
Standard db utilities may export query results in attribute-centered fashion (column names and values being represented as attribute names and values). This may involve pre-parsing the xml from db in order to convert it to parent-child fashion (columns as children instead of attributes). What is the best way to do this pre-parsing (note: I already have the xslt for this; I wonder about the data flow and when/how to run two xslt's in sequence) and then apply test.xslt (preferably without saving intermediate xml result files on the server)?
Question 5
When I open above xml in IE9, this works fine as said. But opening it in Firefox errors (RTF issue, apparently I need to use Firefox's node-set function but I still have to discover which namespace that has), and Opera/Chrome/Safari do not show any content. What exactly are the prerequisites for the various browsers where can I find more information on this?
Q1 If you start by serving an html file which then accesses the xml and xslt via javascript it naturally has access to both the input and the output of the xslt. If you are serving the xml and initiating the transformation using xml-stylesheet pi, then perhaps the best thing to do (depending on what you want to do) is to stuff the original source into the output, then javascript in the generated page can access it if needed, eg
<xsl:template matcj="whatever">
<html>
<head>
<script id="source" type="x-xml-spurce">
<xsl:copy-of select="/"/>
</script>
.... whatever you were going to do
then if you need to access the source in response to a user action on the page, a script can retrieve the script with id source and do whatever is needed. (If there is a possibility of the the source including the string you have to code it a bit more defensively).
Q2 If you want to use the xml-stylesheet API then you have to serve it as xml. However you can instead just serve html and then access the xml and xslt from within a script in the html page using the browsers javascip xslt api. as noted above that is more flexible than the xml-stylesheet mechanism.
Q3 pass
Q4 If you are accessing the xslt from javascript then it is easy to chain the output of one to the input of another without writing back to the server as you just have access to the result as a DOM node (or string, depending)
Answer to question 5: Firefox/Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Chrome all support the EXSLT node-set extension function in the namespace http://exslt.org/common, for IE and MSXML you can use script (imported) inside the XSLT stylesheet to allow it to support that namespace too, see http://dpcarlisle.blogspot.de/2007/05/exslt-node-set-function.html. That way inside the main stylesheet where you need to use the node-set function you don't need to write different code to cater for the different namespaces.
My goal is to use a WCF Service to accept some parameters, generate and then return a HTML string that a user can use to embed on certain webpages of their choice.
Is XDocument appropriate for generating a string of HTML?
I do not really need a full HTML document, just a simple snippet that has some image elements, a p-tag element, and a table element.
It's suitable for generating XHTML, which is valid XML. It wouldn't be suitable for parsing HTML, which doesn't have to be a valid XML document.
There may be more HTML-specific APIs available, but for just a simple snippet of XHTML, using XDocument should be fine.
I have an XML file ("exchange.xml") and an XSL file ("exchange.xsl") for parsing it. exchange.xml has the following line:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="exchange.xsl"?>
Indicating that exchange.xsl should be used to parse the file.
It parses as expected if I load exchange.xml in a browser. However, I want to have exchange.xml embedded in an HTML file which otherwise does not have any XML in it. How do I do this? As far as I understand it, when you embed XML in HTML with the XML tag's SRC ID, you then have to parse it yourself for it to be displayed. I want it to automatically be displayed using the XSL file I've already created for it.
It has also come to my attention that some browsers (e.g. Android default browser) won't parse the XML with the XSL file, and require a server-side transform. Is it possible to embed my XML into an HTML file but use a server-side transform?
As far as I am aware HTML 4 as specified by the W3C does not provide any way to embed XML markup in an HTML 4 document. And of the browsers I know only IE has an extension to HTML 4 that allows that, the so called XML data islands, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms766512%28v=VS.85%29.aspx, where IE's HTML parser recognizes an xml element that can contain XML markup as its content or link to it with the src attribute. So unless you want to use something IE specific like an XML data islands the cross-browser way to load XML as data inside of an HTML document is to use XMLHttpRequest with Javascript.
You can use PHP: XSL class for transforming XML and include it via PHP in your page.
eg: showxml.php
<?php
function processXML($file,$styles){
... //example here
}
<html>
...
<div id="xml>
<?php echo processXML('foo.xml','bar.xsl'); ?>
</div>
...
</html>
The assumption is the webpage is coded with correct tags. How can I Convert it to the XML file? I think the most webpages can be viewed as dom tree...How can I convert it to XML file?
JTidy reads HTML and presents it as a DOM. Once you have your HTML as a DOM you should be able to process it and write it out as XML.
To output a DOM, see the example code here and the XMLSerializer in particular.