[wp-hackers] Re: RSS Decisions

[Denis de Bernardy]

> Out of curiosity, a little side question - can anyone give 
> estimate/guess of the proportion of WordPress install 
> environments which will (already) support XSLT?

I can give you much more than an estimate. the answer is very few.

I had a few xml/xslt based plugins at one point, and it proved to be an
extremely lousy choice.

"Help! Help! My site is broken! I don't understand! What should I do? Why
can't you help me? What should I tell my host?"

Even doing as little as sending a pointer to a faq was too time consuming.
And after I bumped into further limitations related to xslt, which is far
less sexy than it looks in practice, I eventually discarded the thing
entirely.

For the record, I discarded xml handling via php's xml-specific stuff as
well at about the same time: After some testing, it became all too clear
that using preg_match_all was a much better option when it came to
performance. And as a bonus, users were no longer requesting support because
of misconfigured shared servers.

In short: XML/XSLT is slower to code, slower to implement, slower to run,
and requires more support. Don't get me wrong, though. It's a positive ROI
-- for CPU vendors and IT firms.

D.