Why not keeping the application logic just working with XML and benefit from robust toolkits and neat techniques rather than changing HTML-markup in PHP-code?

If you’ve been creating sites with CSS for a while you may be getting frustrated with having to recreate and retest basic layouts on a regular basis. In this article I’m trying to illustrate a simple way of skipping the tedious startup on your average project, letting you get to the interesting stuff as quickly and efficiently as possible.

All that XSLT does is applying code-templates on XML-nodes. In order to do this you need to find the right node. XPATH offers you an advanced toolkit to do that within an XSL-file.

Two of the best known acronyms around right now are XML and XSL, often being mentioned as “the way to go” or some abstract technique that stands for a new direction within the whole web.
Rather than dealing with the languages itself in detail I’ll try to give a pragmatic approach and to show basic examples how to transform data into browser-ready HTML.

This isn’t a new idea but looking at people’s code it doesn’t seem to be a particularly widely used practice: modular CSS. That’s a poncy name for the very simple idea of grouping related styles into separate stylesheets. The same set of tasks turn up on project after project and a little careful thought can save hours of foundation work, allowing you to get on with the serious business of turning a flat design into a web page far more quickly.