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RE: [xsl] Is letting the browser transform XML to XHTML using XSLT a good choice?

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Case for client-side/server-side XSLT transformation

Mr Peterson is telling us that XSLT support in browsers has been good enough
for at least a year or so, and that many websites could benefit from making
use of client-side transformation. This I accept could be true for a small
minority of websites, but not and probably never in general.

I think most of us have s strong feeling that webdesign must be as simple as
possible to be able to develop and maintain in the long run. We simply hate
the idea of having to test each request for a webpage and serve webcrawlers
like Google one page transformed at the server, then to test if browsers
need an XSLT 1.0 or an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet, and then to send both some xml
data store file and the proper XSLT stylesheet to the browser.

Transformation server-side is not just one thing. We should do it the smart
way, that is we only transform our data store to an XHTML/HTML webpage each
time the data store has changed. For the majority of webpages the
transformation server-side only takes place once or twice in a lifetime. For
other pages a couple of times a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour.

Could it really be better to transform each end every webpage every time a
browser requests it, in the browser, compared to once or twice in a life
time server-side? This is what we are talking about for the majority of
webpages.

Even when client-side transformation has some advantages, these must really
be big advantages to make me set up a more complex website.

My conclusion is that the potential benefits of client-side transformation
will in most cases not be great enough to be worth considering.

But I will implement it for at least one of my websites as I test.
 
Best regards,
Jesper Tverskov

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