PUBLIC MARKS with tags xsl & rss

In this tutorial, you learn to build a link graph with XML, PHP, and JavaScript code. Link graphs are paragraphs of keywords in which the size of each word depends on some data value -- in this case, the frequency of the term. The more often the term occurs, the larger the font size of the word. This tutorial shows how to build an RSS parser that in turn builds a keyword list along with the word frequencies. It also demonstrates how to use XSLT to create an HTML page that shows the link graph and relates its term to its original article.

XML is a flavor of SGML used for machine-to-machine communications, such as RSS feeds. It is more structured than HTML and a bit verbose. XHTML is an XML vocabulary which is the coming web standard. XML can be transformed (XSLT) using stylesheets (XSL).

To make your RSS feed look pretty, you add a stylesheet to the feed. There are two types of stylesheets you could use here. The first, using XSL, is more complicated, but does give the potential for some powerful features; you could convert links within the feed into clickable links in the browser, for example. The second, which we will explore here, uses CSS. CSS can't do anything but change the display of the feed, but it's much simpler, and most web designers know at least a little CSS.