creating a .css file for xml

[willroads]

q

[wwb_99]

What you need to do is use XSL to transform the XML data into HTML that a browser can handle. Then all the normal CSS stuff is avaliable for your use.

[brandaggio]

Originally Posted by willroads

Basically I am making a xhtml music player, with iframes to display albums and songs etx.
My first problem is that I cannot make a .css file for the iframe to understand the xml file, i just get the error:

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

How can I fix this? Thank you very much, Will

You can indeed actually style XML directly with CSS, however it behaves differently than (X)HTML which already has some base CSS applied - XML has zero style by default - more like HTML with a CSS "super-duper" global reset applied.

Of course, the first thing you need to to is make sure you have complete (DTD etc.) and properly marked up page/s so the browser/s doesn't choke - a typical XML parser is pretty unforgiving.

Further, in the context you have with the iframe and whatnot I am not sure it would/will work and then you have the issue of browser support for XML (which isn't that bad actually). So you may or may not have some success given the browsers you intend to support (there is always THE problem child browser to deal with) and the compromises you are willing to make. Certainly at least worth tinkering with.

Saxon is probably the easiest way to get up and running with XSLT, should you want to transform your XML to (X)HTML first and then apply the CSS to it.

[willroads]

s

[kgun]

Note, there is (was at least not in XSLT 1.0) an output XHTML method in XSLT. But since, XHTML has to be well-formed XML, you can use XML as the output method for XHTML. That is, you can define the style sheet element like this:

<xsl:stylesheet version='1.0'
xmlns:xsl="http://w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns="http://w3.org/1999/xhtml"> // (Default name space.  I don't like it, so you you may prefix it with your own QName).

<xsl:output method="xml" ...  />

</xsl:stylesheet>

There is nothing new when styling XML elements compared to styling HTML elements with CSS.