I never knew there is another way to separate business logic from presentation except MVC (implemented by Template Engines). XSLT is a new way to generate HTML on-the-fly. It needs two files: an XML file which contains dynamic data, and an XSL Stylesheet document.
There are some people that are using the XSLT approach, such as Tony Marston http://www.tonymarston.net/. He claims:
I have two problems with XSLT. Firstly, it is slow, because XML is a text file and it needs to be parsed before the transformation. Of course, PHP should be parsed too, but adding another level to the interpretation kills the speed. Secondly, how do you generate that dynamic XML file which contains data? I think that we need to have place-holders in a XML file and fill them using a Template Engine! The second approach could be using PHP 5's DOM functions. However, in both cases it sounds too much work, I think it is very slow and it requires very hard work to implement MVC.I did read about other templating engines that are available for PHP, but as these are written in PHP and tied to PHP I rejected them as I wanted something that was totally independent of the underlying language and preferably written to 'open' standards and therefore accessible to a larger community.
I'm really eager to know your views on this subject. What do you think?