I’m doing a project with Ektron CMS400.Net right now, and that system relies pretty heavily on XSL, which I hate. I really think XSL is a tool of devil, meant just to drive me mad. But I digress.
I needed a good little XSL authoring app. XMLSpy is the absolute gold standard in this space, but it’s also $400, which I didn’t really want to pay. Additionally, it’s huge. Hugely good, but bloated beyond belief.
The solution was a neat little open-source app called XML Cooktop. It was exactly what I needed: an interface that takes an XML file and an XSL file, and lets you transform the two with the click of a button. It shows you the raw HTML (well, XML — whatever) it produces, as well as an embedded view of how the HTML would look in a browser (IE, mind you, but that’s what I’m developing for in this case anyway).
Additionally, it has a nice little XPath debugger, kind of like The Regex Coach is for regular expressions.
It’s lightweight, free, and does one thing really well. Exactly what I needed.
XSL will emit any text format, not just html or xml, for example it can be used to create CSV files.
Do you try EditiX ?
This is a nice XML editor, I like it for XSLT usage.
Best wishes
I like xmlBlueprint XML Editor: http://www.xmlblueprint.com. Cheap, but high quality and easy to use.