Re: Clientside XSLT Transformations Design and Concept

> (5Megs into a javascript variable) will the browser than behave
> similarly to loading a the large HTML document?

In my case it behaves _exactly like that_ because the stylesheet takes a
long table in XML format and formats it as a long (several thousand row)
table in HTML, it doesn't try to split it up or chunk it at all. So
probably the most noticeable delay before the document is rendered is
while the HTML layout engine figures out the table columns. This is an
internal document with a rather specialised usage but I mentioned it
just to say that client side XSLT engines can handle (with actually
quite acceptable performance) large documents, and normally you'd
generate some HTML in smaller chunks so avoid much of the HTML rendering
delay.

Of course what's "acceptable performance" depends on what the user finds
acceptable. For old people like me who were happy to let TeX crank out
documents at the rate of half an hour per page, it's not too bad to
wait a minute for a page to display. Seems like the next generation gets
bored after a few milliseconds and needs something to come up within
that timeframe:-)

David


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