Generating an HTML scan report

HTML pages have a particular strength over other file formats; they can be viewed in the web browsers that are shipped with most devices. For this reason, users might find it useful to generate scan reports in HTML and upload them somewhere for easy access.

The following recipe will show you how to generate an HTML page displaying scan results taken from an XML results file.

Getting Ready...

For this task we will use a tool called "XSLT processor". There are a few options available for different platforms, but the most popular one for Unix systems is called "xsltproc"; if you are running a modern Linux, there is a good chance that you already have it installed. "Xsltproc" also works on Windows, but it requires that you add some additional libraries to it.

If you are looking for other cross-platform XSLT (and XQuery) processor, which is easier to install on Windows, go to http://saxon.sourceforge.net/. They offer a free version of "saxon", which is based on Java...