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Re: [xsl] XML/XSLT for web templating
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Subject: Re: [xsl] XML/XSLT for web templating From: Steve <subsume@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2007 18:06:04 -0400 |
Uselessly personal, anecdotal tangent:
XSL has forced me, more than any other language, to behave as a
programmer. I would (and could) have lived my life without ever having
to write a Recursive function. Having done so, I've never programmed
anything the same since.
-S
On 10/8/07, Alessandro Bologna <alessandro.bologna@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Dear collegues,
>
> I was wondering if there is anybody on this list who could share
> some experience (opinions are very welcome too) on using XML/XSLT
> (2.0) as the templating technology for very large news/information
> web sites, vs using a more common Java/JSP,/Velocity or Freemarker
> solution.
>
> As a background information, and to better contextualize this
> request, we have already implemented a prototype, and it's
> beautifully working in production).
>
> In this implementation, contents are available as XML documents, in
> the form of external feeds(Atom, RSS, PRISM etc) and RESTful web
> services that access a JCR/JSR-170 repository.
> Templates are basically XHTML documents, augmented with XML markups
> that allow to navigate the content XML (using an XPATH style
> addressing of the content XML elements) and to present specific
> elements as well. A library of XSLT (2..0) rules is used to process
> the templates, to access the XML using the document function and
> finally to create the resulting XHTML documents.
>
> A minimalistic template may look like this:
> <x:template name="article" target="browser">
> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:x="http://foo.com/x">
> <head>
> <title x:node="article/tout/headline"/>
> </head>
> <body>
> <x:header/>
> <h1 x:node="article/headline"/>
> <div id="body">
> <x:render x:node="article/body"/>
> </div>
> <x:footer/>
> </body>
> </html>
> </x:template>
>
> The transformation happens in pipelined stages, so that it's really
> easy to render the XML in intermediate formats, and do the final
> presentation(s) at the last stage. I forgot to mention that the
> output can be targeted at different devices (such as pdas,
> cellphones, desktop browsers etc) or media (RSS etc).
>
> I have been strenuously advocating this approach, because I see in it
> a a lot of potential:
>
> 1. templates are XML documents, therefore they can be processed (meta-
> templates) still using XSLT
> 2. the XSLT implementation of the tag has easy access to the template
> document and to the content document, so that it can, for instance,
> provide a different presentation if inside a <h1> or inside a <title>
> or a <div id="body">
> 3. it's really easy to author and validate these documents using
> basically any tool (including dreamweaver, eclipse, XML tools etc).
> 4. new presentation rules can be created without altering the
> existing code (using import precedence and/or more specific matchers)
> 5. The XSLT itself can be processed and validated still using XSLT
> (meta-processing)
> 6. XLST 2.0 provides a much better set of tools for generic
> processing, modularity, data control and makes it a feasible task for
> average programmers to maintain this code
>
> So, I have been advocating this choice, implemented the prototype,
> and still, I face a huge resistance based on the "fame" of XSLT of
> being:
>
> 1. Too slow (i proved it wrong already, but still, just yesterday
> somebody was telling about Freemarker being 15 times faster than XSLT
> at rendering docbook, and I know that Robert Koberg has something to
> say about that... :)
> 2. Too difficult because programmers only know imperative
> programming, understand only imperative programming, and are willing
> to learn only imperative programming
> 3. Too unknown ("everybody knows JSP...")
> 4. Too old ("XSLT is dead, or at least I heard so")
> 5. Nobody uses it for this purpose (really? pre-cooked HTML from XSLT
> is so unheard of?)
> 6. Too hard to maintain ("it becomes very messy very soon")
> 7. Too hard to read ("XML is not meant for programming..., #if () is
> so much more readable")
>
> So the alternative is Velocity, Freemarker or JSP and an XML/Java
> binding solution (such as JAXP), and this alternative is considered
> more scalable, more robust and more flexible. In other words, the
> push is for templates made of:
> <%=article.headline %> (or <# or <@ depending on the poison that you
> choose) .
>
> I apologize for this long email, and I realize that this may not be
> the appropriate forum for such an inquiry (please list-owner feel
> free to censor it if it's the case), but at this point I really need
> (after months of useless advocacy on my side) some opinions and
> experience and real world examples, if anybody has one to contribute.
>
> Best regards
> Alessandro Bologna
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