With XML being published by nearly all dynamic websites, social media applications, APIs, and its many uses in enterprise-level content delivery systems, now is a great time to learn basic XSL. At its core, the eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) provides a means of formatting XML documents to display in a different and often more practical fashion.

In the last post, I gave an overview of why you should use XSL. This is first in a series of three hands-on tutorials where we’ll build on that knowledge and start using XSL in conjunction with XML to transform the result into HTML to display on a restaurant web site.

Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a powerful technology often treated like a misfit by the design community. The fact is XSL isn’t that difficult to learn, makes websites faster, offers many ways to format content, and makes working with XML data easy.

Many XSL tutorials are either too technical, make too many assumptions about prior knowledge of the technology, or don’t have an obvious practical application. In this introduction, I hope to change that by presenting a plain-language overview of XSL, how it differs from CSS, and lay the groundwork for a 3-part tutorial where we’ll use XSL in a real-world situation.

To keep creative work from becoming homogenized, it is important to have discovery and research as part of the design process for each project. Generating fresh ideas can be challenging when you design all day, but as designers, we need to keep innovating to overcome the client’s marketing challenges.

For many people the first and only stop for design ideas are CSS galleries, but stepping outside the norm can deliver unique and original design results. In this post, we’ll look at how art and life experience can be adapted to produce two unique web design elements with a nature theme.

With Twitter, Google Wave, and Opera Unite, there has been a lot of recent talk regarding the future of the web. You may have also heard of Wolfram Alpha, a non-traditional search engine capable of complex calculations and conversions, as part of the “future” discussion.

With all the hype, I decided to check Wolfram Alpha out myself. Initially, I struggled to find a use for the data, but as I spent more time exploring the possibilities, I came across some useful ways it can be used for producing web sites and general business purposes.

If you have been following the best practices for website optimization published by Yahoo’s Exceptional Performance team, you know the importance that using gzip to compress files and making fewer HTTP requests can have on website speed.

While doing some research, I came across a number of powerful techniques that uses PHP to optimize CSS files. By combining these techniques, I was able to achieve some impressive enhancements resulting in a 71% reduction in the size of my CSS files.