An efficient and systematic method to generate XSLT stylesheets for different wireless pervasive devices

Abstract

It is a tedious and cumbersome process to update directly a WML document for the wireless Web because its content composes of both data and presentation. Thus, XML is used to handle the data while its XSLT stylesheet is used to extract and format the data for presentation. However, different stylesheets have to be used for different devices. An efficient and systematic method based on the idea of generating two separate sets of rules corresponding to content extracting and formatting parts of the stylesheet is described in this paper. The data extraction part is constructed from content rules while the formatting part is constructed from presentation rules. They are then combined together to form a stylesheet by an XSLT generator. A large number of stylesheets corresponding to different devices and a number of standard DTD documents or XML schemas can be generated in this way and stored in the pool during application setup stage. They will be individually selected from the pool by an XSLT engine to produce different WML documents for different devices during run time.