On Wednesday, June 26, 2002, at 09:05 AM, John Holmes wrote:
> I disagree. Maybe I'm just not getting it, or understanding the "FULL > POWER" of xml/xslt. It just seems like it's adding in an additional > layer that you don't need. It seems so dependent on browser versions, > and parser versions, etc. Just make a plain HTML template and a small > template parsing script to insert the variables you need. Pattemplate is > pretty close to XSL, but I haven't seen any speed comparisons on it. Yeah, but what if you want to output to a format other than HTML? For instance you want to generate a PDF invoice, which is emailed to the user, but you also want to display that invoice to the user? Should you have two separate files/sources of data? You could have one XML file, and use XSL to make an HTML document which appears in the user's browser and a PDF which is emailed to them. The point of XML is to look beyond the web browser as a point where the user needs data. PDAs would benefit from non-HTML formatted stuff (too small a screen for most web pages), cell phones have their hardly-used WML, there are tons of different print formats like PDF or PostScript, plus alternative formats like troff (for man pages) and POD (for Perl manpages) and others. XSLT lets you output from one source file to any desired format. If you need versatility in the output of your data, XML can really help you. Plus, it doesn't depend on browser version if that's what you're worried about -- it can be done server-side: use PHP to perform the transformation before it gets to the user if it's going to their browser. That's why some XML-based sites let you choose whether to view the page in HTML or XML (so that if you want to use a spider or script to parse the data on the web page instead of looking at it in a browser, you can do that much more easily with the XML formatted output than the HTML formatted output). Later on down the road, when (hopefully) all browsers incorporate an XSLT processor, the burden of performing the transformation can be handled by the client. Not that client-side technology has been very successful at standardizing, in consideration of different JavaScript implementations, CSS implementations, and even Java Virtual Machines (witness Microsoft consistently refuse to ship a decent JVM with their OS, even though they are freely available from the Sun web site). That's why server side stuff like PHP will probably always be invaluable. Erik ---- Erik Price Web Developer Temp Media Lab, H.H. Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
