Offline XSLT processor

If you need an off-line XSLT processor, nothing beats SAXON. It supports XSLT 1.0 and XSLT 2.0 and the lower-end version is free. I am strictly using the 1.0-only version to ensure my code is compliant with major browsers, but you might want to get the 2.0-version for special projects.

I'm primarily using SAXON to test my XSLT code (or develop new programming techniques) before deploying it in a distributed environment. I was also using it to develop the WordML transformations that are now executed within the context of Save As ... function in Word.

Simple high-level wrapper for Sarissa

In some cases, Sarissa calls are too low-level for my needs. For example, sometimes I need a function that would load an XML document synchronously and just throw an error if something fails. Here it is:

function loadURI(uri,async) {
  var d = Sarissa.getDomDocument();
  d.async = false;
  d.load(uri);
  if (d.parseError) throw("Error loading "+uri+": "+Sarissa.getParseErrorText(d));
  return d;
}