Summary
XSLT is a powerful tool to transform server-side XML data into client-side HTML markup. Most commonly, it’s used on the web server, where its usage increases the server CPU utilization as well as the web page download time, since the HTML markup is usually significantly larger than the underlying XML data.
In this article, you’ve learned how you can use the <?xml-stylesheet ?> processing instruction to request XML-to-HTML transformation on the web browser. This solution doesn’t require JavaScript (like AJAX-based solutions) and thus is also available to visitors who have disabled JavaScript in their browsers.
With this solution, server-side XML-to-HTML transformation will be performed for visitors without XSL-capable browsers, as well as for search engine spiders. A cookie set with an automatic browser-check is used in the framework presented in this article to identify XSL-capable browsers; all other visitors receive traditional HTML markup generated on the server.