When transforming XML via XSLT, make sure the output setting for indenting is turned off and honoured by your code.
Turning it off will often speed up the transform and save a bit of output size. Continue reading
Just as web developers want to use standards on the client side, standards such as XSLT on the server side may be an efficient way to create good quality markup and other web output.
It can help avoid the hard coded or hard to edit HTML strings that are often seen in server side templates and scripts.
As an open standard, XSLT is reasonably universal, and skills can be easily transferable.
Some people don’t like it or have had bad experiences with it in the past.
But it can be a very powerful tool in the developer’s toolbox. Perhaps it is worth giving it another look?
This article looks at why XSLT could be useful as part of the View in an Model-View-Controller pattern, its benefits and potential drawbacks. Continue reading
A couple of XSLT profilers have recently been announced.
One by Microsoft, and one by PHP for the up-coming PHP 5.3.
The PHP one is interesting as it can be invoked from within your PHP code thus profiling actual run time XSLTs. Continue reading
ASP.NET is a leaky abstraction because it tries to hide away some of the details of HTML markup generation for you when sometimes you need to know about the underlying markup.
In doing so, it is too easy to create ASP.NET sites that violate web accessibility guidelines and contain unnecessary markup bloat. In some cases, ASP.NET makes it really difficult to create the exact output you need. But there are a some options to address this problem. Continue reading