David A. Desrosiers wrote:
> They transform it on the server, because that's EXACTLY how it was
> meant to be delivered.

Not necessarily. XML is meant to delivered as XML, not pre-transformed to
some other language. XML does not do anything by itself, that's true.
However, an XML *application* (or dialect, if you will) does. After all
XHTML is an application of XML.

Actually, RSS serves as a good example to disprove your point. There are RSS
clients that allow the user to display different views of aggregated RSS
feeds. They enable users to work with XML content "actively" (sorting,
grouping), rather than just serving as a dumb renderer. Doing all this on a
server is always slower and wastes bandwidth.

Transforming XML content on the client is the most desirable solution from
another standpoint and that is that the client knows best how to render the
content for its platform. Think of SVG. If you have renderer for a PDA
display it can take into account different resolutions for different PDA
displays. (JPluck G does this, in a simplistic manner.)

> Displaying
> actual XML content on port 80 is just a blatent misuse (or
> misunderstanding) of the technology.

I don't see how this is blatant misuse. Of course, displaying raw XML in a
web browser without some means of styling doesn't make sense. However,
Mozilla 1.2 supports XSL transformation on the client. If you have multiple
stylesheets, the browser can display different views of the same data simply
by switching stylesheets, without requiring a roundtrip to the server.

However, if content providers would offer XML feeds they would lose control
over
the content itself. A client would be able to format and repurpose the
content in any way they wanted. If you think this through, it's not hard to
see that this means the death of sponsoring on the web. A client could
simply strip away any fluff or advertisements and go straight to the real
content. That's why it's not in the content providers' financial interest to
provide XML content feeds.


Regards
-Laurens

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