XML — Architecture, Tools, Techniques - Department of Computer ...

1.7 Summary
A reasonably portable representation of information in a web browser can only be
accomplished using HTML.
One should really use CSS to separate form and content of the information, at least to some
extent, and in order to maintain the form in a central place.
If it is not guaranteed that all clients use a current version of Internet Explorer complete with a
properly installed XML/XSLT system — and this hardly true even in a small intranet — one
should convert XML in the server and should not send it to the client. (MSXML3 is considered
to be somewhat incompatible with the future development of XSLT.)
XML has the obvious advantage that one can use modern character set encodings and reuse
information and present it differently in different places.
It is debatable if XSLT — at least by appearance as an XML based document — is a usable
language, but manual transformations are significantly more labor intensive. XSLT is for XML
what awk is for lines of text: one can select parts of a document and create a new document
by way of a program.
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