When I was in college eight years ago the college offered an elective night class in the use of xml and xsl, which allows you to define styles and layouts to present the xml data. I remember thinking to myself "That would be interesting. I mean XML is gonna be the wave of the future". So, I took the class.
Though the class covered the basics of the topic only and did nothing overly fancy or advanced I could see the potential of integrating/using these formats to broaden the users html experience. Unfortunately, to my knowledge it never really took off. This could be that at this time Flash was becoming the fad for doing amazing websites.
I had pushed xml/xsl to the back of my mind because it seemed that it was not going to go anywhere. However, now it seems that it may have the potential I thought it was capable of. Being an avid World of Warcraft player, I often visit their site at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com and noticed that there pages are almost exclusively XML pages and recently the launched a new online version of the WOW online newsletter, as can be seen at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/gadgetzan/mainindex.xml.
It might just be my taste, but I find the styling, layout, and presentation of the WOW site to be quite amazing. So, I finally took a look at some of the code behind the pages and notice how the XSL sheets made almost exclusive use of DIVs for content containers. DIVs have been a topic of dispute between programmers and designers as of late, but perhaps the use of XML/XSL could become the new web someday.
Another intersting example, again on WOW, is the armory at http://www.wowarmory.com/index.xml. Notice the custom styling of there drop-down boxes.
I think I'm going to spend some time looking into developing sites with XML/XSL styling and presentation. It could be the tool for taking our web development to the next level.
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