XSLT & hello

[mike]

Again - I see this as being still making sense to reside in the
application layer, since the possibilities of inputs and outputs are
infinite (well, could be...)

I'm not sure the browser reliably reports it's XSL processing
capabilities without using JavaScript, in which case, you've probably
already side-stepped the webserver (or, you have to use all this in
combination with each other)

I don't believe there is still any consistent client-side XSL that can
be adopted that is safely cross browser and such. Last I checked
Google had an XSL processing library that was as close to
cross-browser as it got, but it still wasn't 100%.

I'm not saying it's not worthwhile for some folks. I am just not sure
it's meant to be in an nginx supplied module. Extensions obviously
anyone can cook up for any reason... and XML/XSL offloading is a
common desire (ZXTM does it, there's some hardware appliances even
that will do it for you) - someone has already said they'd love it for
their application - the need -is- there, but I'd rather it be
something external to core nginx development as there are some other
features that should reside in the server that have not been finished
yet...


On 4/8/08, Chris Farmiloe <chris at oxdi.eu> wrote:
> The main benifit I'm after is being able to decide from the nginx.conf
> something like this (pseudo):
>
> if($user_agent is unable_to_perform_xslt){
>   xslt on;
> }
>
> This would allow me to offload the majority of the XSLT processing
> client-side, but still support some of the older browsers, text-only,
> screen readers etc.
>
> I'm also a fan of a complete separation from application level code...
> although XSL is about presentation, XSLT is simply the process of
> conversion and unlikely to need modifying.
>
> I see you're point about converting between random formats, but if you
> think about it... YES... if there was an XSLT module you could handle
> almost any output you could create with XSL. and maybe even override
> the style-sheet to use ie..
>
> location ~* .csv$ {
>  xslt on;
>  xslt_stylesheet /xsl/csv.xsl;
> }
>
> It could allow you to create application servers that only talk one
> language (XML) while allowing you to still build REST style services
> that respond to multiple content types.
>
> chrisfarms.
>
>