#26/01/2012#

"From The Daily WTF: Sketchy Skechers.com"

I just had to share this true nugget of web development: skechers.com.  It appears that the server sends the browser some XML and some XSL to do the transform into HTML.  But wait!  There’s a problem doing that in IE because the XSL engine in it doesn’t support a few really useful things in later versions of the XSL spec, so if you visit skechers.com in IE, it sends you XHTML!

Beautiful, truely beautiful.

I should point out that I do like the idea of XSL, and once you’ve bashed it hard enough into working it’s quite cool to pass in some XML and get something else out the other end – be it XML, HTML, text, JSON…  But trying to deal with IE is such a pain that if you’re going to architect a CMS to transform XML using XSL you might be better doing it on the server where you’ve just got the one platform to deal with that can be extended in a suitable way.

Thinking about it, if I remember correctly, our favourite software development company’s high quality CMS product used XML\XSL.  Maybe that’s were the blazingly fast speed came from…

Hmm… might not be such a good idea after all…

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