I wanted to use LotusScript, if possible, to include some XML headline channels on our Web site. This article, while not intended as an in-depth tutorial on XML (Extensible Markup Language) or XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), shows how, with some LotusScript and the free Microsoft XML object (MSXML), you can download, parse, and format XML documents easily, either by tree-walking or using XSL patterns in a style-sheet.

XML headline structure
Headline files are published as channels for inclusion in 'personalized' sites such as My.Netscape or My.Userland and typically contain news items with a link to the full story. You can, however, get the files themselves; a great starting point for exploring XML since most of them use the same de-facto format, Netscape's RDF. Here is a partial example from a recent DominoPower XML file (these are updated daily):

As you can see, headlines have the typical XML tree structure; just think "categorized view". A Notes view can be formed from the root (rdf:RDF in this case) and each twisty can be formed from a child node which, in turn, can contain other twisties/child nodes and so on. At the end of each branch is the column value. Given this format, what I needed was an agent that could download this sort of file every few hours, parse out the headlines, and create an HTML table I could insert into our site. First, though, I needed MSXML on my machine.