The job's been to take a whole load of bibliographic information from the backend of a publishing system and convert it to something which can be brought into a design package to quickly put together a catalogue. Of course, nothing is as easy as it should be, and there are a lot of little hurdles to this which - a year or so ago - would have had me running off, tail between my legs. (Actually - it *did* have me running away from the problem: I did try to write something to solve this, and entirely failed!)
But now, with a bit more thought and general XML experience, I've managed to find ways to get around all those problems, and now the biggest problem we've got is that there's a certain amount of inconsistency in the data itself. (It was all imported from some other system, and some of the data there is well over fifteen years old. And wrong.)
Generally, though, I'm amazed at the power of XSL stylesheets and what they can do to a piece of XML. Pretty much anything, really. You can even create functions within the stylesheet like any other kind of language, which is incredibly useful.
However, there are some caveats. (There always are.)
Now, as with many things, there are different versions of the stylesheet implementaton, and they come with different functionalities. Sadly, the design package in use (InDesign), will only support version 1.0. Which is a shame, because all the really cool features (the functions mentioned above, and some of the date/time function as well) only came in in version 2.
However, if you've got a bunch of data in XML format and need to repurpose it for something a little different, I'd recommend checking out the possibilities of XSLT. There are plenty of free tools available and it's not too hard to get the head round it. And it might just open up a whole new purpose to your data - or in this case, save a whole rakeload of time. And those are two very noble purposes.
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