Well out of necessity I created a xslt today. You may be wondering what the heck a xslt because I know that Rachel always gets confused with all the acronyms that I talk about. When you are in the world of techie web developers all day you don’t even think about how much you use acronyms. Ok back to xslt it stands for eXtensible Style Language Transform, also known as xsl (same thing just with out the transform part). So now you know what it stands for but i bet your still scratching your head wondering what the heck this all means. Well before I tell you why xslt is so cool I need to tell you about xml (O no not another one this one means “eXtensible Markup Language”) . XML has been around for a while but lately it seems like it has been picking up speed in the amount of people using it. The main use of xml is to store data with information about that data. For example lets take my uncle O’s cd collection (the largest cd collection that I have ever seen). Each cd has a artist, album title, location of cd, and many other unique attributes to each cd. What xml does is it stores all that information for each cd in a digital file. This is what it would look:

<cdlibrary>
 <cd>;
  <artist>B.B. King </artist>
  <albumtitle> Best of the Blues Vol. 1 </albumtitle >
  <location> Family room Cabinet </location>
  .
  .
  .
 </cd>
 .
 .
 .
</cdlibrary>

Now, here comes the xslt. Once that information is in the xml file you have the ability to “transform” the information. Such as to use that information to search the massive innovatory of cds. You could search for cds by the location to show all the cds in the family room cabinet. Thus, showing off the ability to process information with xml and xslt.
The way I used it today was for the Interactive map that I created for DePauw. One of the features of the map is that you can link into a specific building so when the map loads it goes directly to a specific location on campus. The problem was that no one knew how to link into the map but me so this is where I used xslt. All the information for the map is stored in a xml file so all the data is there i just needed to reformat the information so anyone could use it and its easy to understand. So I transformed the information so it listed all the buildings on the map and next to the name it gives you the correct link to go directly to that building on the map.
Well I hope that makes some sense if it doesn’t feel free to make some comments and I will answer your questions.