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The benefits accrued to both the client and the content provider are enormous.
From the client’s perspective the benefits include the following:
•
Download time is minimized. Once the stylesheet is downloaded and cached, you only
need to download a few kilobytes of information. This can improve your download time
by orders of magnitude
while using your existing connection
.
•
You can have several stylesheets, each of which displays the same information in a
different way (for example, with tabular formatting versus paragraph or with charts and
graphs).
•
Once information is downloaded, you don’t have to remain online to perform further
manipulation of data. If you have the right stylesheets or applets downloaded/cached,
you can make use of your PC’s standalone strengths, that is, perform client-side
processing.
•
You can perform intelligent rearrangement of your data at the client’s side (for
example, sort by highest gains).
From a content provider’s perspective the benefits include the following:
•
The server is taxed less. Your server only has to deliver smaller portions of data to
your clients, therefore your server is taxed less and can perform faster.
•
The server doesn’t need to develop HTML pages. All it does is forward raw XML
information to the client, and the stylesheet takes care of all formatting issues.
•
Because XML is Unicode compliant (that is, tags can be in virtually any language) you
can create separate stylesheets in different languages (for example, French or
German) and continue to serve only data to clients around the world. To put this in
simpler words, you can make your services accessible to anyone in the world, no
matter what language they speak, with very little overhead.
