I have been developing web apps for a while now and for the past year I have been really exploring as many technologies as possible. I know some people are creating pages using XML and XSLT or maybe css style sheets; however, it seems to me that the trends are still not moving in direction. Plus it seems less functional/easy than XHTML/CSS based pages.
What are the benefits of using XML/XSLT, and is it ideal to start developing in that manor? Is there anything else new that is pulling ahead of the pack in regards of front end web development?
The reason I am bringing this stuff up is because it seems that many people are switching from XML as a datasource to JSON, which makes more sense as a datasource; however, XML is still functional as a markup language…
And on that note, why would I even want to use XSLT vs CSS for the XML pages if i were to start develop that way. It seems to me that they serve the same purpose except that XSLT looks like tag soup.
I hope this question makes sense….
XSLT can be useful if you have an XML data source that needs transforming into HTML. Otherwise you should be using HTML, CSS and jQuery for front-end development.