XSLT to generate SVG tutorial

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Introduction

This tutorial will teach you how to generate SVG graphics from XML data. We will produce both pure SVG and HTML5 embedded SVG.

Learning goals

• Understand the purpose of XSLT, i.e. be able to think of XSLT as a translation language.
• Do simple transformations from XML to HTML
• Be able to use simple XPath expressions (tag and attribute names) in template selectors and for element and attribute extraction.

Prerequisites

• Editing XML (being able to use a simple DTD). Catch up with the Editing XML tutorial
• XML namespaces (some, have a look at the XML namespace article)
• HTML and CSS (some)
• XSLT Tutorial - Basics
• Static SVG tutorial (important)
• SVG/SMIL animation tutorial (optional)

Next steps

• XPath tutorial - basics
• XQuery tutorial - basics (if you have interest in XML databases)
• PHP - MySQL - XML tutorial - basics (shows how to display an XML result-set retrieved form MySQL with XSLT)

Links

• Using XSLT and SVG together: a survey of case studies by Max Froumentin, Vincent Hardy, W3C, W3C/Sun Microsystems Inc. (2004). This is a somewhat outdated text, but I took some ideas from the introduction.