First Post - Heck yeah... No php
Okay, I have now done something with XSLT that should not have been done. This entire site is generated on-the-fly with XML data files in a folder-oriented heirarchy and XSLT. Currently all text other than the sidebar and footer are completely dynamic.
I checked to see how slow the XSLT was because I was loading many files and such, so on my AMD64 it took .015 seconds (real) to build a page on this blog compared to .075s to do a blank php file. That is nice when you begin running the markup on a server that is 13.5 times slower than your machine (and 32bit). In addition, since libxml2, libxslt, and mod_xslt are so small, they will not require as much RAM (which is nice if you only have 16MiB).
Organization
I use the following list of standards and solutions to form this site:
- XHTML 1.1
- CSS 2.0 (plus one Mozilla extension)
- Javascript
- XSLT 1.0
- mod_rewrite
Although I am using the XHTML 1.0 doc-type, the markup is based on XHTML 1.1. This is because I have to use the text/html media type. I am using CSS 2.0 to do some of the nicer presentational effects without adding markup. I still have to split up the CSS into multiple files. The Javascript is just to give IE some of the CSS 2.0 features of the site and to swap between a fixed and fluid layout (will be working after I separate the CSS). The XSLT converts the XML files into a page. And mod_rewrite just makes the "Recent Posts" the main page (try /index).
I will need to use php to build a front-end for adding posts, but they are not too much of a pain to do by hand.
When I have more time I will describe more of how it all works and enable a way for the XML files to be viewed raw, but for now just look in /shared and see what you can find.