worldwideweb [2]

Andy Jackson was inspired by the release of XML tools for RISC OS [3] by Justin Fletcher the other week.




Andy has ported the widely utilized Expat utilities and the Sablotron XSLT processor.




With the advent of these utilities, there should be some pretty interesting developments with RISC OS applicatons using XML. One such suggestion from Andy himself, is the potential to add Mozilla-style XML/XSLT browsing features to native RISC OS browsers!
The utilities that Andy Jackson has ported can be found at http://anjackson.org/poot/riscos/xmlutils/ [4] and consist of:

• outline - create textual descriptions of XML documents
  
• elements - create a list of tags used in an XML document
  
• xmlwf - check an XML document for correct tag formation
  
• sabcmd - The amazing sablotron XSLT processor (from Ginger Alliance [5])
  

Further documentation and examples can be found at http://anjackson.org/poot/riscos/xmlutils/ReadMe.html [6] which includes one example of how to use XSLT and XML to keep a website style consistent across a whole site.




The release of these tools along with Justin Fletchers' utilities, have really brought our favourite platform forward massively in the space of a couple of weeks. Let's hope the developers of these and other applications see the potential soon.
Note: For further details, utilities and explainations about XML/XSLT please see this recent article [7]