Included stylesheets

[David Wall <d....@computer.org>]

I'm trying to create a system where an end-user can upload their customized
stylesheets (XSTL) so that they can customize the way a given (X)HTML page
looks for them.  But the resulting HTML needs some common code that all
users require, such as common navigation buttons at the top and bottom, an
html form that wraps around it all so that if the user clicks submit it goes
back to our site, etc.

The basic thought might be to create a common "header" xslt that creates the
headers and starts the form that we need, followed by the user's custom look
xslt for forms fields and for the way the data actually is displayed,
followed by a common "footer" xslt that creates the footers and ends the
form.  Obviously, much of this can be accomplished by allowing the user or
common xslt to include the other and let the various rules trigger to create
the resulting page.

Has anybody does this before?  Does it work?  Is there a better approach?

I'm mostly concerned about the added performance overhead of not only
applying the user's xslt, but also having to do some sort of
"include/import" of the common xslt.

Thanks,
David

Server versus browser based transforms

[David Wall <d....@computer.org>]

Can anybody comment on the practical viability of converting our JSPs to
XSLTs such that we return the XML data with a link back to the XSLT for
those browsers that support it (NSCP >= 7 and MSFT >= 6 and all
Mozilla/gecko and likely Opera >= 7), or doing the transforms on the server
for the older browsers?

I just wonder if there are known issues with using XSLTs built into the
browsers versus being able to always rely on the version on your server.  I
recall with Java applets, this was a huge problem because each browser had
different JVM implementations with different bugs (and of course MSFT's
"enhanced Java" version).  So while the promise was great, the practice was
most painful.  We found similar issues when using CSS early on for easily
customized looks, in which there were enough variations in the browser world
that it was pretty painful to make CSS work effectively.

Is XSLT mature enough in the implementations that I would end up with the
same results using XALAN on the server for older browsers and the built-in
transformers on the newer browsers?  Clearly, if we could get the browsers
to do a lot of the lifting for formatting their HTML pages, that would
reduce the load on our servers.

Thanks,
David