[Catalyst] HTML::Widget and output into a html table

[Brandon Black]

On 4/13/06, A. Pagaltzis <pagaltzis at gmx.de> wrote:
> * Brandon Black <blblack at gmail.com> [2006-04-14 01:15]:
> > My goal was to have my webapps send a very abbreviated chunks
> > of raw xml content (not XHTML, but custom app-specific xml
> > formats, things like <custom><foo>xxx</foo></custom>), and
> > reference a static XSL stylesheet which transforms it into
> > XHTML + all the usual display attributes you see in CSS.
>
> Generic XML in custom formats on the web is generally a bad idea.
> Only the desktop browsers have XSLT engines built in; many people
> on mobile devices will be cut off from your site, search engines
> won't know how to index you, etc.
>

All those caveats are quite true, but I still like the idea, if only
it worked.  In my case I was building more of a web application than a
web "site", and pretty much all of the content requires authentication
and is dynamic, so indexing isn't an issue.  The mobile devices thing
is to some degree, but I imagine mobile browsers will only get more
capable over time.  In the case of dynamic content that cannot be
cached after transformation, it's a good scalability win on the
server-side to just send raw data to the browsers and let them handle
the "transform for display" part.

> > My dreams of sending only compact, relevant, raw-form xml data
> > to the browser dashed, I moved on and never looked again.
>
> And your point is? This doesn't have much of any bearing on the
> language itself. I've never used it in that capacity, FWIW, and
> I find it plenty applicable for my use cases.

I'm sure it is useful for many cases, probably even for me on the
server-side if I could find the time to look into it all again in that
light.  But it just seems like such a great win (in some circumstances
anyways) to do it on the client, I just wish the browsers supported
dynamic application of the XSL to make it work with non-static pages. 
Nobody else really seems bothered by this or willing to implement it,
and I'm certainly not enough of a browser hacker to do it either.

So I guess my "point" is that all this XSLT talk brought this issue
back up in my head, and I'm just venting :)

-- Brandon