RE: [PHP4BETA] Can PHP do XML + XSL = HTML stuff ?

At 3:33 PM -0200 2000-03-15, Manuel Lemos wrote:

Hello Lucas, On 14-Mar-00 16:08:21, you wrote:

As I have been saying doing XML-XSL processing to serve pages at online time is a waste of performance, especially when there are much more faster and objective methods. [...]

Sure, it wouldn't be a very fast solution, but there are lots of advantages that many people still don't see: Imagine, you want to develop a web-interface for a database, which is used to store specific XML-documents. Now: how to transform this into HTML (maybe later to PDF, LaTeX, whatever). This transformation is the only "intelligent" aspect of your whole application: It's not very difficult to develop your own XML-format for your documents, but it's quite useless without transformation.

Maybe you didn't notice what I said, but if you generate XHTML (XML compliant HTML) you don't need to invent another document format and you don't need to transform it to serve as Web pages because it is already HTML.

You don't need to transform it to serve as Web pages, but what if you want to use it to serve for other output formats as well? XHTML may be somewhat better than regular HTML for that, but HTML is horrendous and it's not clear to me that XHTML really will go very far toward that end. It's still basically presentation-based rather than content-based, and that doesn't help a lot for generating other output formats. -- Paul DuBois, paul@snake.net