IIS

Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) is the second most popular web server on the Net today. However, it's a distant second, and thus there aren't nearly as many high-quality options for adding XSLT support as there are for Apache.

Microsoft publishes an unsupported XSL ISAPI Filter. Like other ISAPI filters, it sits between the requests and the file system, making changes as documents are requested . In particular, it transforms documents according to an XSLT stylesheet before forwarding them to the client that made the request. It can cache stylesheets and apply different stylesheets to match the browser or XML document type. This filter also supports pipelining of stylesheets so that the output of one transformation can be become input to the next . It can also transform ASP-generated content, as well as static XML files. It's based on the MSXML parser/XSLT engine and thus shares that engine's bugs .

Michael Rothwell's published XSLTFilter (http://www.xsltfilter.com/), a shareware ISAPI filter that works with ASP on IIS, and is much more suitable for practical use than the XSL ISAPI Filter. It uses the Gnome project's libxslt processor, which is significantly more conformant to the XSLT specification than MSXML. XSLTFilter also has the useful ability to tidy up traditional malformed HTML and then transform it as well.

Whichever server you use, and whatever your favorite language is, chances are good there's a server-side XSLT plug-in for you. It is far more reliable to use this plug-in to transform the documents on the server where you control the environment than to send the XML document and stylesheet to the client and hope it has the necessary software to transform the document itself. Since XSLT is a fairly processor- and memory- intensive process, this can place a significant load on the server. However, since web pages are normally not too large you can support this with a beefy enough server. Do not let the disappointing lack of client-side XSLT support prevent you from using XML and separating content from presentation or taking advantage of the full power of XSLT.



Effective XML. 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML
Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML
ISBN: 0321150406
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 144

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