I am, today, very very surprised that this basic
functionality is still not
there, is it because:
a) Actual players have vested interests in a mainframe like
architecture?
b) People lack imagination with XSLT based technologies and
nobody thought
about this simple feature?
c) software producers are sleeping on the switch?
d) XSLT is unpopular
e) an asteroid felt on earth and anybody with the will to do it was
destroyed?
It's none of the above: it's because of costs and risks.
I think most of us can see that doing transformation on the client makes
sense in principle. But the problem is that you have much more control over
the server than you have over the client. As soon as you do things on the
client you have to cope with a bewildering variety of versions and variants,
and this is a nightmare for quality assurance and potentially for support
costs. Also, it means you have to put up with using highest-common-factor
technology: you can't use technologies like XSLT 2.0 until five years after
they emerge, despite the huge productivity gains they bring. (XForms and SVG
suffer from the same issues.)
So it's not an easy choice, and there's no single answer that's right for
every project.
The option of doing both - client side when possible and server side
otherwise - is one way forward, but it adds to your overall system
complexity and cost.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
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