MACROMEDIA DREAMWEAVER 8-GETTING STARTED WITH DREAMWEAVER Getting Started page 177

XML documents do not contain any formatting—they are simply
containers of structured information. (You'll notice that the sample code
contains no font, table, or heading tags.) Once you have an XML schema,
you can use Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) to display the
information. In the way that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) let you format
HTML, XSL lets you format XML data. You can define styles, page
elements, layout, and so forth in an XSL file and attach it to an XML file so
that when a user views the XML data in a browser, the data is formatted
according to whatever you've defined in the XSL file. The content (the
XML data) and presentation (defined by the XSL file) are entirely separate,
providing you with greater control over how your information appears on a
web page. In essence, XSL is a presentation technology for XML, where the
primary output is an HTML page.
Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is a subset
language of XSL that actually lets you display XML data on a web page,
and "transform" it, along with XSL styles, into readable, styled information
in the form of HTML. You can use Dreamweaver to create XSLT pages
that let you perform XSL transformations using an application server or a
browser. When you perform a server-side XSL transformation, the server
does the work of transforming the XML and XSL, and displaying it on the
page. When you perform a client-side transformation, a browser (such as
Internet Explorer) does the work.
The approach you ultimately take (server-side transformations versus
client-side transformations) depends on what you are trying to achieve as
an end result, the technologies available to you, the level of access you have
to XML source files, and other factors. Both approaches have their own
benefits and limitations. For example server-side transformations work in
all browsers while client-side transformations are restricted to modern
browsers only (Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 8, Mozilla 1.8, and Firefox
1.0.2). Server-side transformations let you display XML data dynamically
from your own server or from anywhere else on the web, while client-side
transformations must use XML data that is locally hosted on your own web
server. Lastly, server-side transformations require that you deploy your
pages to a configured application server, while client-side transformations
only require access to a web server.
Learn about using XML and XSL with web pages 177