Summary

Now that you have come this far, you have seen all the basic techniques you need to start programming and using XML in your Visual Basic applications. The next chapter will introduce you into the linking of XML documents to each other, but that technology is still very premature. So, we've now seen all the subjects that are ready for use.

 

In this chapter, we have learned a lot:

XPath

We learned how to use XPath to query a very specific subset of nodes from a loaded XML document.

We learned to create sub-queries using predicates on our XPath expressions.

We looked at the built-in functions of Xpath.

We covered the limited support of XPath in Internet Explorer 5.0 and the more complete support in the developer's preview MSXML 2.6.

XSLT

We learned how XSLT works and which processors can be used to try it out yourself.

We had a long and intensive look at all of the elements and functions supported in XSLT 1.0.

We looked at the level of implementation of XSLT in both IE5 (MSXML 2.0) and MSXML 2.6.

We looked at some examples that used XSLT to transform an XML source into another XML format. Converting from one schema to another schema.

Styling

We learned how you can give style to an XML document using Cascading Stylesheets.

We learned how to use XSLT to transform an XML document into an HTML document to display it.

We looked at some uses of XSLT to add functionality (internal navigation, external content) to a document when transforming.

We saw how to use client side XSLT processing capabilities to let users browse XML documents without first transforming them on the server.