I’ve started and stopped and restarted and restopped rewriting my blog engine a bunch of times already. Pretty much as soon as i put this one online, i realised it has way too many faults. But i was, to put it simply, lazy to actually finish any other (not as if this one was complete and finished, it has the basicest of basic functionality, and that’s it).

And i can say, every time i develop website code, the hardest part is templating. How to separate content, representation and scripting. I don’t like having unrelated tags and stuff in my raw writings (especially since i got my new keyboard, with which if i use the hungarian layout, it’s a pain in the ass to type < and >) and i don’t like putting php in my template files either.

What remains is either using search-and-replace on a lame formatting language i make up for this purpose, but it usually ends up just as complicated as if i used php. I do know a good solution, and that’s xslt. I would’ve trusted that if Blizzard used user-side XSLT on the StarCraft 2 website (well, the previous one at least) it’s supported enough, and it seems it is on desktop browsers, but not so much on mobiles. And i myself have a phone with a quite picky browser (NetFront), yet intend to use my blog from that. (Though i still have to figure out how would i input hungarian accented characters with a japanese phone…)

The problem is, server-side xslt seems to have performance issues. Although i haven’t tested it (yet), everywhere i read how slow php’s xslt transformations are. And though that would most probably mean a few hundredth of a second, i’d rather check it before writing an implementation. An implementation, which would make my developing life loads easier, by the way.

If you have any data on php xslt speeds i’d really appreciate it.