I've got a piece of hardware for which we're looking to create a web control interface. This hardware currently utilizes eCOS to control the web interface/HTML generation and I'm interested in potentially getting away from that.
I'm unfamiliar with web programming, but thought that XML and XSLT would be a potential path for this. The big design requirement is that the user not have to be running anything other than an off-the-shelf browser like Firefox or IE.
When the web server gets a request, do I simply send the XML and XSLT files, does the XSLT file have to be present on the user's machine, or does the XSLT file perform the transform within the web server before sending HTML?
I know that's a painfully simply question for those with more experience, but I throw myself at your mercy in the hopes of some assistance.
In can be done either way - in many ways, it is better to transform on the server, as you can't ensure browser compatibility.
XSLT transformations are possible on recent versions of both IE and Firefox (simply add a reference to the stylesheet to your XML document - it can be a remote URL). However, support varies between the browsers and the different versions.
In order to ensure that you know what the browser gets, I would transform on the server (possibly caching the transform results).