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You can achieve near SPA performance with XSLT in the frontend, and stitching multiple XMLs using it.

- No JS fallback by default

- Naturally friendly to XML database backends

- Huge cache hit improvements

- Effectively, you get the functionality of the now abandoned "seamless" iframe attribute

A certain fortune 500 finance company did their entire website this way using java 6 EE and serving up the data layer with XML -> Hibernate -> DB2 mainframe queries about 10 years ago. Probably still vestiges of that now.

Yeah but then you have to use XSLT.

(Jokes aside, I tried this years ago hoping for it to be a magic bullet. Gzipping meant that the bandwidth savings weren’t anywhere near what I hoped and XSLT is a PITA to deal with)

I'm not sure if it's still a going concern but I found SXSLT made XSLT much less annoying to deal with. It's a natural fit for S-exprs.

Tons of 10+ years old bugs in Chrome, yes, full of hacks, but it's doable.

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