I started working on a new stylesheet for the jQuery API documentation. Both the current and it’s alternative, Visual jQuery, have some serious limitations.
My draft tries to handle the biggest problem: An easy-to-use navigation. Both alphabetical and categorized listings are to be displayed as nested (for categories) and expandalbe trees. So far the listing itself works.
It’s intersting to see what is possible using XSLT: It can generate unique IDs and makes creating the navigation extremely easy.
Stay tuned for updates.
I’m curious what the advantages are of using XSLT over rendering a (X)HTML page from the XML file. I’ve actually done that with some simple PHP, and to me it’s seems like you have much more power that way.
XSLT is quite powerful, too. With the current setup, only the raw XML file and the XSL file is transfered to the client, the rendering happens on the client side. We could still pre-render it on the serverside and only send the rendered XHTML to the client.
Developing is definitely easier when the rendering is happening on the client side, because there is no serverside scripting involved.