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

The answers above provide a good survey of some of the advantages and disadvantages of XSLT. I'd like to add another disadvantage. We have found that you pretty quickly run into scalability issues when using XSLT for moderately large datasets.

When processing XML files, XSLT must load the entire document into memory. With Xalan, this consumes roughly 10x the size of the input file (saxon has an alternative DOM implementation that uses less memory). If any of your input datasets grow beyond a couple of hundred megabytes, your XSLT processor might just flake out.