Re: PGSQL and XML

operationsengineer1(at)yahoo(dot)com wrote:
> With lots of help from folks on this mailing list, the readme files and
> other net sources, i've found a simple process for seeting up an WinXP
> box as PHP/PostgreSQL development environment.
>
> Just as I was getting started to begin work on my PHP apps, I ran into
> this...
>
> http://www.joot.com/dave/writings/articles/php/
>
> http://www.joot.com/dave/writings/articles/bsp/
>
> and the last message here...
>
> http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/3799.htm
>
> Which put me in a dangerous state of mind - thinking.
>
> Should I evaluate XML and XSL to see if it makes more sense using it
> than PHP scripting? Is keeping the business logic separate from the
> presentation important enough to switch technologies (at least I'm at
> the beginning stages)?

I used XML and XSL to write my documentation to test how ready for
primetime it is. First of all, it requires either Mozilla or IE6+.
Second, both browsers implement it slightly different so the look is not
the same. There are XML/XSLT -> HTML transformation modules for
Perl/PHP/etc to support browsers that don't support XSLT but they take a
damn lot of CPU power.

The next part of the equation is that XML / XSLT are not programming
languages. What that means is that you still need PHP/Perl/Java/Python
to extract data from Postgres and output as XML. Then the XSLT
stylesheet you create to present the data is applied to the XML to
output as HTML.

Needless to say, outputting directly as HTML is much easier to do.