Question

I am in the preliminary stages of planning a project with a client to redo their current website. I took a look at their current site to see what issues they are currently dealing with and upon inspection I noticed that every page is being rendered entirely using XSLT. I am familiar with XSLT, I have used it to render custom controls that need to be refreshed often on the client-side, but never to render an entire page.

Help me become less ignorant, what could be the reasoning behind this? What benefits or disadvantages does this bring to the table?

Answer 1

Server-side:

Advantages:

• Clean, concise templates
• An easy way to process XML data into HTML
• Reasonably fast

Disadvantages:

• Programming model unfamiliar and uncomfortable for many procedural-language programmers
• Awkward if some or all source data is not in XML
• Can be very slow when not used carefully (small changes can have large repercussions)

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Client-side:

Advantages:

• A convenient way to off-load processing onto client code, where scripts can potentially have much better knowledge of how best to format the resulting HTML.

Disadvantages:

• Browser support is all over the map.
• Google won’t thank you.