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by gizzlon
4166 days ago
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> It's called XML with XSLT. But that can only generate XML/XHTML, right? Also, fast compared to what? Many options are fast if all you do is replacing some values. Static pages can just be written out from memory or disk, a whole nother level of fast :) |
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As for fast: compared to any other templating engine for server side languages. It was very long ago when I tested this, but for rendering a simple blog page XSLT with lxml (so completely on the C side) was much faster than Jinja2. I suspect only things like Mustache would have a chance here, but then again: XSLT is Turing-complete (probably accidentally, but still).
And that's before taking into account that you don't have to do rendering server-side at all - you can just serve static files and rely on the browser to render them. I don't know if it would be faster than serving static files and rendering with JS, but it has one advantage: it works even for people who have JS disabled.
There are many problems with XSLT, though. XSLT 1.0 is almost unworkable and XSLT 2.0, while specified, is nonexistent: nobody bothered to implement it. Once you start using implementation specific ways of extending it, you lose the benefit of being able to render on a client. Turing completeness can be a trap, too: you can code infinite loop in XSLT, and good luck debugging it (or even recognizing where do you loop in the first place...).
Still, XML and XSLT are a very nice technology, which should be used much more often. The problem, I suspect, is that XML is "yuck" nowadays, which means no one wants to use it, learn it or improve it.