Ionrock Dot Org

I have been playing around with creating pages using just XML and XSLT. The great thing about it is that you can really separate your data from your presentation in a way that user agents can easily grok. This is a great thing because it means that you can effectively Atom-ify your whole web site and all its data without even thinking about it. The negative is that there seems to be a need for more dynamic XML.

More specifically, the style sheets used to present the data need to be able to change per request, and in turn, per user. I know this is possible, but I am curious what others have tried along this path. Part of the reason I see it as necessary, is XSLT is very verbose. Even a simple template can balloon into a rather large document. Having a good way to dynamically generate the necessary boilerplate code and general necessities is an issues.

Along the same lines, the XSLTs need to be configured per request. Fortunately, you can pass parameters to an XSLT, but I don't know if the browser can do so automatically. This is a non-issue if you are processing the XML/XSLT before sending it to the client, but my goal here is to simply serve files and let the client do the work. I don't mind a bit of javascript for this, but in the long run, I am trying to stay away from it.

If this type of development can be done quickly and efficiently, it makes for an extremely powerful system. It is kind of silly for something like small business site, but for anything that distributes data, it is helpful.