It was year 2000 and XML was the hottest thing since lava. The great plan was that the server generates XML output and the browser XSLT transforms it to different HTML content depending on the context. I think even IE6 supports client side XSLT transformations.
Now, my question is, what happened for this idea and why it failed? Search engine indexing? Something else?
Since CSS never fulfilled it promises that you can use it to create different layout for different medias [1], could it be possible to apply this XSLT idea to create different web / mobile page views for the same content? This would, naturally, require mobile browsers to support XSLT client side transformations and I am not sure what’s the situation here.
XML (raw HTTP payload) -> XSLT transformation (client side, JS) -> a) web page b) mobile page
[1] http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockonjs-4
You may be interested in playing with the alpha release of Saxon-CE (client edition), which provides XSLT 2.0 support on any browser that supports Javascript. All feedback on the product is welcome.
As well as being browser-independent and supporting XSLT 2.0, the aim is to allow you to tackle much more of the development job in XSLT, including things previously done in Javascript like handling user interaction and responding to mouse events.
Visit http://www.saxonica.com to try it out.