Question

I may be overthinking things but is there a standard markup for templates?

I have data in a database, there is css for formatting a document, there is xhtml for the document itself, but is there a standard for the structure of a document minus the content of the document? on the simple side, a template could just be the xhtml document just replacing the data with a {fieldname} type thing that would be replaced when the xhtml document gets created. On a more complex side it would allow some form of scripting for conditional situations or repeating blocks of similar data, etc. I’m wondering if there is a standard already for templates similar to the xml standard for documents.

Answer 1

Check out XSL.

XSL stands for EXtensible Stylesheet Language, and is a style sheet language for XML documents.

XSLT stands for XSL Transformations. In this tutorial you will learn how to use XSLT to transform XML documents into other formats, like XHTML.

Your only problem could be to get your data in as xml, which isn’t really all that hard or even very easy depending on the database you’re using.