XSL Plus Local Links

We are coming to the home stretch of my XML college class. The current topic of interest is the eXtensible Stylesheet Language. At first XSL seemed a bit confusing. Like XML Schema, it was not a simple topic if you don't know what the heck is going on. Luckily we got a few homework assignments that are driving the points home.

My latest chore was to produce a list of unique cities from our big file of XML data. No trouble. I put together a little template that compared the current node to the preceeding ones. Any dups got culled, leaving me with a unique list. Simple to put it in order with too. We also needed to show all the raw data, grouped and sorted by city. Another template took care of that in short order.

Next came what seemed to be the tricky part. The unique city listing needed to be comprised of links that took you to the section in the raw data there people from that city are listed. I figured I needed a link to a local in my HTML file. Just need to generate an ID, and reference that ID. And what better a way to generate these anchors? XSL templates of course.

I wonder how some of my other classmates are doing. Some of them got stuck in the XML Schema assignments and never came out. I just hope they know their HTML. It is a requirement for this course.

Almost a Hoodie Ninja

I just read some info on the Hoodie library. This thing claims to let you write web apps quick. One fun thing was that it stores stuff locally, and can work even if you are online. A lot of the sample code looked positively simple. Can this possibly work? I don't know. But it has my interest.

Then I came to the following declaration:

Hoodie is currently a developer preview. Some features are missing, some things might change, there's a lot of optimization to be done. Don't use this for production.

Oh snap. That did not instill confidence. I guess it is nice to get an early look at what they might have going. But I don't fool around much. I write code that I want to ship now. Perhaps I should wait and see how Hoodie pans out. Too bad. It seemed pretty cool.