University of Houston
Department of Computer Science

In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science


Tao Zhang
will defend her thesis

XSL Stylesheet Generator

Abstract

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is designed and developed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Its simplicity, combined with its platform and application independence, makes it attractive for data exchange in increasing number of areas, especially between disparate systems. Schema is a mechanism to define the model or structure for XML documents. eXtensible Style Language (XSL) is a stylesheet transformation language especially for XML. It allows for an easy transformation of the contents of an XML document into other formats including XML, PDF, HTML, etc. While XSL makes it easy to transform XML, writing an XSL stylesheet itself is not so easy, especially for non-programmers. Further, it requires that each XML document structure be studied and understood. It would be nice to have a tool that can generate the stylesheet automatically.

In this thesis, we design and develop an XSL Stylesheet Generator that automatically and dynamically generates stylesheets. This application is implemented based on the close relationships among XML, Schema and XSL, and uses Java and an XML Parser. It first generates a tree view of the structure of an XML document. It then lets the user choose, from the tree notes, what information they want to be presented in the transformed HTML output. Finally, it generates the XSL stylesheets according to the user's selections. Among all of its benefits, efficiency, user friendliness, ease of use and wide applicability are the most important.

Date: Monday, April 2, 2001
Time: 7:00 PM
Place: 550-PGH


Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Venkat Subramaniam