HTML into XML and Back

Converting my resume from html into XML (the eXtensible Markup Language) was a fairly simple task. In my opinion XML is significantly more intuitive then HTML, I simply followed some new rules. Check out my resume in XML: Jordan's Resume XML Version.

Getting the XML to be presentable is another story. I decided to use XSL (the eXtensible Stylesheet Language) to transform the XML back into HTML. One of the nice things about XSLT is that it is XML that describes how to present a given source. In other words once you figure out XML basics XSL should be easy to figure out. A really nice tool that I've found was IBM's XSL Editor (pictured above), an excellent free download. It allowed me to transform XML via XSL into HTML on the fly. Check out my XSL stylesheet used to transform the XML resume into HTML: Jordan's XSL stylesheet.

Here's the final product: Jordan's converted from XML into HTML resume. (I left out the CSS bells and whistles found on my other resume formats. To see those click here).

Here are some helpful links for XML and XSLT:

  • IBM Alphawork's XSL Editor
  • W3C Schools Web Tutorials
  • ZVON.ORG
  • O'Reilly's XML.com
  • Builder.com