Chess Viewer: Demonstration of XSL FO and XEP

The power of XSL lies in its ability to perform radical transformations of the XML data source. This page contains yet another proof for this fact: you can build a chessgame viewer with a stylesheet!

The source document is a transcription of a chess game played by Garry Kasparov against a chess supercomputer -- IBM Deep Blue. The game is encoded in a form resembling the well-known Portable Game Notation (PGN) format. The source is very compact: a sample game on this page [DeepBlue.xml] is less than 4 kBytes in size.

The stylesheet converts this arid text into a sequence of board diagrams, drawing every intermediate position as a graphical image (a special chess font is used). Applying a 23 kB stylesheet [chess.xsl], we get a 415 kBytes (!) FO stream [DeepBlue.fo]. These numbers give an idea of how deep the transformation is.

The final step of the whole procedure consists in converting the result into PDF using XEP. The resulting PDF file [DeepBlue.pdf] is much smaller than the source FO stream -- less than 90 kBytes. (XEP implements PDF compression).

We hope XSL fans will enjoy this example; and XSL foes will acknowledge its power!

More chess games created by the same stylesheet:

We have used an unabridged chess notation; the original PGN data are even more concise. We know it is possible to process even the short chess notation by XSL, and gladly leave this exercise to volunteers .