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In the beginning of my career, about 15 years ago, I had a job working with a large auto parts retailer and they had all of their products in these massive XML
by mstade 6y ago
In the beginning of my career, about 15 years ago, I had a job working with a large auto parts retailer and they had all of their products in these massive XML files. We used XSLT to transform those into all kinds of things, including physical printed catalogues that would go in their stores. Obviously the XSLT didn't actually print catalogues, but we did turn them into some format that I forget now (maybe PDF!) that we could just send straight to the printers.
It was pain and suffering developing these style sheets, but once done it worked like a charm.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago> Obviously the XSLT didn't actually print catalogues, but we did turn them into some format that I forget now (maybe PDF!) that we could just send straight to the printers. Was Adobe FrameMaker involved?
- oever 6y agoThat must have been XSL-FO, a W3C standard. There are several implementations, like Apache FOP, that turn XSL-FO into PDF.
- rapnie 6y agoThat's nice. I was in the same line of work. Started from building our own XML parser, when there were none available yet. Later I developed this fun XSLT that generated a fullblown Forms UI based on an XML and/or XML Schema which we used in a custom CMS. Then with XSL-FO and Quark XPress we generated user manuals and product catalogues from that. The XSLT was surprisingly fast for the time, and given the transformations it needed to do.