So now that I’ve got my blog automagically rendering XML into HTML through XSLT for browsers that can’t hack it, I’d like to extend that to my entire web server. This will take a little bit more work. First I’ll describe the general concept:
User makes a request for a given page such as index.xml or foo.php
Post construction of the page (so this will work with PHP and what not) the module checks the header on the page, if it is text/xml then we proceed to the next step, otherwise return data unprocessed
Check to see if browser is one that can handle getting an XML stream returned to it, such as Firebird. If it is, then return the stream unprocessed
We should only reach this point if the content is text/xml and the browser does not have and XSLT engine. If this is the case, dig into the XML file and see if it supposed to have an associated stylesheet to go along with it.
If there is no associated XSLT sheet, return the data as straight XML. This way it still is possible to send back things like RSS feeds.
Finally, run the XML file and XSLT sheet through an XSLT engine and return the output to the client.
There are a few other packages out there that claim to do some XSLT transformations for Apache, among them are modxslt and murka. It appears that modxslt has been dead since 2001, which make me wonder how well it will work with newer version of Apache. Murka seems to be fairly up to date, but I don’t like how it doesn’t allow the client the pleasure of doing the XSLT transformation. I say pleasure because allowing the client to do the rendering opens up some neat opportunities for new ways of accessing the site. I’m also not a fan of how it creates so many virtual URLs that tend to make stuff confusing for administration. I would just like the request to always be for foo.xml rather than all the other extensions.
As far as actually implementing this, I don’t know jack about how to write a module for Apache 2 (I’ve got a book on Apache 1). Also, it’s been a very long time since I’ve written anything in C. I was thinking that it might be neat to work with modpython, but then I’d need to install modpython, which I’m too lazy to do. Well, that and I’m also not sure if it links as deep into Apache as modperl does. So with all that being said, I think that I’m going to make a shot doing it in C. It will be a good exercise. I’ll keep updating this section of the blog as I go.