A posting from Paul Prescod (ActiveState) announces a 'community run' collaborative website called the XSLT Cookbook Project. The designers invite contributions to XSLT lore in the form of code, comments, and ratings for recipes. This dynamic collection "will allow programmers to be more productive with XSLT, and will provide a dynamic space for the rapid content development of a cookbook. The XSLT Cookbook is a new project based on a very successful experiment of ActiveState and O'Reilly called the Python Cookbook. The idea of an online Cookbook is to get people to contribute 'recipes' that other people can then take and use in their programs -- in this case, XSLT snippets to be used in stylesheets and transformations... The XSLT Cookbook is not a FAQ because it only deals with snippets of code and discussions around them. It doesn't talk about implementation issues or deep language semantics or anything other than snippets of code; unlike a FAQ, the Cookbook is completely community run. The Cookbook is also very different than a collection of code in a library such as EXSLT or the XSLT Standard Library. The nice thing about a library is that you directly plug in using import/include. The Cookbook is for the code that cannot be so nicely packaged; XPath expressions are a perfect example..."

The XSLT Cookbook supports browsing by category, e.g., (1) Embedded Scripts; (2) Hyperlinks and URLs; (3) Mathematical Calculations; (4) Microsoft-specific; (5) Miscellaneous; (6) Parameters; (7) String manipulation; (8) Using Formatting Objects; (9) Using HTML; (10) XPath Tricks.

From the announcement:

I've discussed this with Steve Ball of the XSLT Standard Library and he sees the projects as complimentary. I certainly hope that some of the recipes will build on the code libraries out there: "This recipe shows how to use EXSLT to do X". Cookbook recipes can also be discussed in comments and rated by end-users.

Right now the XSLT Cookbook is very small because the XSLT community has not yet been invited to start building it. Consider this an invitation! We need recipes in all categories and we may even add categories as we get recipes (e.g. we'd love to fill in SVG and FO categories).

We are working hard to integrate the XSLT Cookbook with the next version of our Komodo XML/XSLT/Python/Perl/PHP development environment. It will soon be possible to submit and download cookbook recipes right from within Komodo. When you combine the XSLT Cookbook with the free educational license for Komodo you have a really excellent environment for teaching or learning XSLT. In the longer term we will also add this feature to our Visual XSLT environment, probably after Visual Studio.NET ships.