Re: [xsl] Modern web site design with XML and XSLT

Subject: Re: [xsl] Modern web site design with XML and XSLT
From: Rob Belics <rob_belics@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 2010 08:37:08 -0600
On Sun, 2010-01-03 at 13:22 +0000, Philip Fearon wrote:
> One other simple workflow to consider (the one I currently use for my website):
> 
> 1. Design basic website in a WYSYWIG XHTML/CSS desktop-based web design tool
> 2. [Key difference] Still on the desktop, use a specialist XSLT (1.0
> or 2.0) based tool to automate repetetive transform tasks on your
> website pages that web design tools are (generally) ineffective at
> 3. Load XSLT modified website back into the web design tool, check the
> visual design aspects using its built-in preview tool
> 4. Use your preferred tool to upload your verified website onto your web server
> 5. Use server-side components to transform and cache, using XSLT,
> those parts of your website, that must be updated in real time
> 
> Benefits
> -----------
> 1. You can use XSLT 2.0 features
> 2. Faster loading web pages (as well as being customer-friendly, this
> may be important in future for Google page-ranking)
> 3. SEO friendly - Web bots process 'static' XHTML pages more effectively
> 3. A 'green' solution: Saves energy (at measurable levels for popular
> websites) because the transform is done just once for most of the
> website, rather than on each page load
> 4. Because the transform happens prior to uploading the site, you can
> easily check for coherence and verify the site visually
> 5. Depending on the tool, you can also generate and check
> PDF/OOXML/ODF/EPub copies of your website at stage 2
> 
Thank you for that. I was all set to give up on this after reading about
SEO issues. Since I code for ecommerce sites, SEO is important, of
course. It just hadn't occured to me that I could test for the search
engine bot and do the transformation on the server side for them and any
browser that can't do its own transformations. Rather obvious. I'm also
reading about Google getting more involved with XML but I can't see them
wanting to devote processor time for xslt. Perhaps they'll start taking
in XML as something other than plain data.

I was also getting discouraged with the lack of support in the browser
but I get the inkling XML support may get better as the years go on. 

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