In a post
to the
cocoon-dev mailing list with the challenging title of
"Is Cocoon going to be harmful for
XML?"
Stefano Mazzocchi asks if XML server side transformations
will not slow down the movement to more
innovative client side XML architectures.
In a carefully balanced message, Stefano Mazzocchi's asks
the Cocoon community if the project cannot be
considered as a hack to take most of the benefit of XML on
the server side, making less attractive a more
generalized adoption of XML and potentially slowing down the
movement toward client side XML:
While server side transformations allow
new formats to be 'adapted' to
older clients that do not support these formats, there is a
great risk
that, having this type of transformation capabilities on the
server
side, there will be less 'pulsion' to the creation of
XML-capable
clients.
This concern, which is common to other server side XML
transformations, had been recently
discussed on the
XHTML-L mailing list.
The major arguments for server side transformations
include the need for "semantic firewalls", and the
requirements from web site designers to support a wide range
of client releases, as mentioned in this answer
from Donald Ball:
Stefano, in the real world, we're still
supporting 3.0 clients and at
least paying lip service to supporting 2.0 clients. Doing
XSLT server-side
is necessary, now and for years into the
future.