Is there a point creating a site using XSLT

Is this technology still popular?

I want to make a website which automatically transforms XSLT files. It should work like this:
When a user accesses the site, a single handler would accept his request and then find a suitable XML for it (according to the URL requested) and transform it using its attached XSL file.

I want to do this in order to make it easy to update the site using plain XML files (instead of using a full-fledged & expensive CMS system).

What do you say? good idea? bad idea? anyone has a recommendation?

Thanks!

XSLT is just one method of templating. It is also just one piece of a complete MVC framework, where templating being the View component. XSLT is a great technology, but it's slow and not a first choice on building a scalable web site.

Research on MVC frameworks to see which one fits you best. e.g. ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, Catalyst, etc.

I know few big web portals which work using XSLT a lot, here in Poland. They used because it can minimize the amount of data sent over the network.

I also worked on the project (Huge HRM application) and we used it there to transform our programming language to .NET.

I would say it is sometimes very useful.

Answers based on "the syntax is hard" is no answer at all imho. A). It really isn't, and B). You're supposed to be a programmer, just learn it.

Definitely other technologies are advancing at a pace XSLT hasn't since 2005ish, but it remains a powerful tool which gives you a level of abstraction that, say, asp.net webforms don't, and allows you to provide a general scalable solution to trivially serialise to a range of output formats. It's easy to generate HTML with any given language, it's harder to now extend that to XML, now extend that to JSON, now extend that to CSV.

And cached transforms are plenty fast enough in an environment which is still I/O bound.

OTOH, storing *data* in XML is generally not a good idea. Far better to store in a DB/mem and serialise as required for all the reasons above.

At work, a project I'm on uses XSLT and to be honest, it's a real pain. The actual XSLT files aren't that difficult to work with, but having to create XML adds an extra layer of complexity. I've also found that beyond the most basic pages, the XML tends to get very bloated and messy. So, no, I wouldn't recommend it.

Take a look at

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It is a free open source CMS tool that uses XSLT extensively to generate pages.

To all those who claim XSLT is hard I would say that it is no harder than SQL. There are scenario's that are hard such as grouping, just like in SQL trees are hard.

Pick the right tool for the right job and you shouldn't have any problems.

Sounds like a bad idea to me. It's much easier to use something
like ASP.NET with the content stored
in a database - you can then update
the content directly into the
database - which in itself will be
easier than editing the XML.

> I want to do this in order to make it easy to update the site using plain XML files (instead of using a full-fledged & expensive CMS system).

Er, what? There are many free and open-source CMSs.

What spoulson said above about templating is the point. Providing output pages from input XML files is fine. But that doesn't get you a CMS. What about C.R.U.D.? Search? Page listings?

If your site is so small that all the relevant updating can be done by you hand-editing some XML files, then why not, go for it. But if it's that simple you might as well just edit HTML by hand.

I like the idea. XSL is a fantastic tool, but you have to have that special moment of enlightenment before you realise how useful it really is. Before that it just seems so-so.

I have used XSL in a variety of applications and it has saved me a lot of time. But obviously dont just use it for the sake of it.

What you are describing already exists and is Apache Cocoon:

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