At 05:07 AM 8/19/2004, Mike wrote:
Converting your XML to HTML at publishing time will almost certainly give
you a performance advantage over doing it at page delivery time, provided
that your content is sufficiently stable to make this possible. It's also
simpler and likely to improve availability.
Then too, what's "publishing time" will vary, and if it's very frequent (or
continuous), that might shift the balance back to transforming on request.
What M.David said about caching and the conveniences afforded by modern web
servers and XML frameworks is very relevant, too (while acknowledging the
truth of "simpler is better", particularly when my server is down, ehe).
Somewhat more reflectively, I have often supposed that the practicality of
batch-mode publishing (which many of us do) makes it impossible to discern
how much data on the web is actually being generated, at some point in its
lifecycle, from XML source. It is in connection with this kind of
observation that SGML (whence XML was derived) has been called (in a book
by Chet Ensign) the "Billion-dollar Secret".
Cheers,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez
mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285
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Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
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