Re: Faster HTML Output.

[Pete Hall <pbhall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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XML, if designed optimally, can produce a more efficient datastream than
HTML because it consists primarily of data. All of the formatting
resides elsewhere. If the browser can process XML transformations,
(XSLT) as both IE and Firefox can do (albeit not especially the same),
one can send an XML document containing many iterations of a data
structure, while sending the rendering instructions only once in the
XSL, which incidentally, can also use CSS for producing the visual
characteristics of the browser content. XSL can produce DHTML in the
browser, which can further reduce the traffic by doing client side
validation, detail hiding/showing, etc. It's also quite easy to sort
summarize, filter, even cross-reference data from other XML documents
with XSL. XML document manipulation in this scenario is done on the
client. That's a blessing and a curse, but it also increases overall
bandwidth by removing that responsibility from the server. I wouldn't
advocate trying it on the internet, because the client configuration
there is tentative at best, but in an internal WAN environment, it works
quite well.

Pete Hall
pbhall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://pbhall.us


albartell wrote:
> > Sending XML instead of HTML will certainly improve your throughput, but it
> still needs to be rendered to a readable format somewhere.
>
> How exactly is XML vs. HTML improving throughput?  It sounds like you are
> more referencing the bloat of using tables for formatting vs. CSS.  I would
> have to guess that CSS would allow for a smaller document than XML - but I
> suppose that depends how bloated the XML tags are.
>
> Aaron Bartell
> http://mowyourlawn.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Pete Hall
> Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 5:25 PM
> To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
> Subject: Re: [WEB400] Faster HTML Output.
>
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> Sending XML instead of HTML will certainly improve your throughput, but it
> still needs to be rendered to a readable format somewhere. I have a captive
> IE shop (good and bad in that) where I can rely on msxml3 to give me
> consistent rendering, so I us client side rendering. It offloads a lot of
> processing from the server side, and is certainly friendlier to network
> bandwidth. Still can take a while to render a document with xslt though, and
> that's entirely dependent on client horsepower. BTW, if you go this route,
> use attributes instead of nested elements where possible.
> It makes for a much smaller datastream, and do NOT worry about indenting
> nested elements. That's a big-time throughput hog with large documents.
>
> Pete Hall
> pbhall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://pbhall.us
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