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