Distributing Server Load with XML and XSL

“Your Web server has a tough job. It must connect to databases, retrieve data, process it, format it into HTML, and then send it to the client. Increase the life of your server by reducing the load on it using XML and XSL. The eXtensible Stylesheet Language (or XML) is a style-sheet format for XML documents that is the counterpart to the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) in HTML. By sending the XML and XSL to the client, and having the client create the HTML for you, your server can spend time doing other things, like processing credit card orders!

Requirements

Server and client should have the XML parser, version 3 from http://msdn.Microsoft.com/xml. The client should have IE 5 or higher.

Overview

An ASP page will connect to a database and retrieve the data. Then it will be converted into XML and sent to the client. The ASP page will associate an XSL URL in the data stream it sends to the client, and the XSL will have a CSS associated with it as well. Once the client receives the XML and fetches the associated XSL and CSS, the client will transform the XML into HTML.

To simplify the code, we won’t be using error checking, but you should use it in your production applications.”

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