Nowdays, most of the browsers on the market do not support parsing xml files and are not able to correctly apply xslt stylesheets.
Even worse, some browsers are not standard complaiant and do not follow the specifications closely, leading to a world where xml can hardly be used in web applications.
mod-xslt2 is a server side module able to transform ``xml'' documents in ``html'' (or to any other format) before they even get back to the browser.
At time of writing, this module can be used with apache 1.3.x (stable) and apache 2.0.x (testing), but other web servers may get supported in the future.
mod-xslt2 main features include:
the ability to parse generated xml (ability to parse the output of php or perl scripts).
the ability to use the ``xslt'' indicated by the <?xml-stylesheet processing instruction.
the ability to send back the xml file unparsed to the browser.
the ability to fetch xslt or DTDs from scripts rather than from static files.
the ability to fetch a different xslt depending on the content of the request headers, of the get parameters or the web server environment.
the ability to allow xslt stylesheets to make use of these variables to generate output.
As an effect of a more generic API, this version of mod-xslt2 supports both apache 1 and apache 2, while work is under way to provide a cgi and proxy wrapper to allow mod-xslt2 to be used on any other server.
The more generic API should also be usable to provide support for servers like IIS or others, even if I'm personally not going to write code for closed source products.
The build system has also been completely rewritten and a whole set of new documentation included in the original package.
Keep also in mind that I'm not native english, and as though I'm trying to do my best, please report any error or ``strange'' sentence you may find in this (or any other) document provided with mod-xslt2.