Talli -
The abstraction sounds really good in theory, but I have yet to see it pay off. One is supposed to be able to retarget XML for different, non-HTML devices (WAP and reduced-HTML devices like Blackberry come to mind), but I think that will only result in
- severly inelegant user interfaces for those devices, as they try to represent XML that was seen as appropriate for a web browser, or
- great inefficiencies for the application servers as they generate, then throw out, vast amounts of XML that can't be shown on the limited devices.
I get the feeling that you'd be better off building two sets of templates for two different kinds of targets.
It turns out that we've managed to solve the problem of getting dynamic information from a procedural language to XML-land, and it doesn't suck. We basically built adapters between Perl datatypes and XML structures. It's not a 1-to-1 mapping, but it's good enough and the code you write remains concise.
