Benefits/Disadvantages of using XSL to render entire web pages

Question

I am in the preliminary stages of planning a project with a client to redo their current website. I took a look at their current site to see what issues they are currently deali

Answer 1

XSLT on client side

• Disables progressive rendering. User won't see anything at all until entire stylesheet and data is loaded completely.
• Not supported by search engines and other crawlers. They'll see raw XML.
• Not supported by older/less advanced browsers.

XSLT in general

• Unless you carefully design your stylesheets, they may quickly become difficult to maintain:
  • with numerous templates it may be very difficult to figure out which templates are applied.
  • verbosity of XSLT and XML syntax make it hard to understand anything at glance.
  • XPath tricks are tempting, but nightmare to modify later.