Take a categorised view like this one, which should make sense to anybody living on the planet, unless they happen to be American ;o), and look at the DXL it produces when you open it using a URL ending in "ReadViewEntries". As I said earlier this week, it doesn't really make sense that there are 8 top-level viewentry nodes. What would make sense is if they were all children of a node that represented the category they were in - like in this xml file. The two may well look the same at first glance but if you take a closer look you will see that each document is now two levels down from the root.

How did I do this? Well I didn't do it by hand, that's for sure. I used this XSLT that Dave Meehan of Replicated wrote and then kindly sent to me. It might sound strange but using XSLT to convert XML in to yet more XML is a perfectly legitimate use. Whether or not the result of this particular example is of any benefit is another matter. What it does show is the basis of the XSLT that you need to turn the "flat" XML of a categorised view in to something that can be better visualised. Learn from it. I definitely have. Dave is now held in my God-like list of contacts.

If you have no interest whatsoever in either XML, XSLT or SVG then you may as well turn off for the next month or so as this is all I will be bangin-on about ...