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Re: XML support in browsers?

• From: Peter Hunsberger <peter.hunsberger@gmail.com>
• To: Dan Vint <dvint@dvint.com>
• Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 13:11:20 -0500

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Dan Vint <dvint@dvint.com> wrote:
> What is the state of using XML (not xhtml) and xslt stylesheets to serve up
> documents on the client side with a browser? I'm refactoring a website of
> mine to manage the content in XML.
>
> I'll be building some XSLT to produce XHTML from this content, I was just
> wondering if it is safe to serve the XML directly or should I just generate
> static XHTML and place that on the server?

Personally, for a public facing Internet site with a potentially large
audience I do not think you can expect to do client side XSLT in
general.

> I'm suspecting that the older browsers are still out there and that my
> answer is going to be use the static HTML. Assuming that, any speculation on
> when we might be able to do this? Is there interest in the industry to do
> this?

I think the industry has somewhat decided to ignore client side XSLT
and moved on.  For sites with dynamic content of any form the current
approach being to use client side AJAX and maybe XML (though I
personally lean towards JSON) from the server to the client.

If you have a real need for XSLT in producing dynamic content then you
may end up with a hybrid approach; projects like Cocoon will let you
run the XSLT client side or server side as appropriate and determined
by browser capability sniffing.  However, from your description this
doesn't sound like a real issue?

-- 
Peter Hunsberger

• References:
  • XML support in browsers?
    • From: Dan Vint <dvint@dvint.com>