Long ago I learned that system source code is not as important as data. You can always hire hot-shot software developers to (partially machine-)translate the sy

Long ago I learned that system source code is not as important as data. You can always hire hot-shot software developers to (partially machine-)translate the system into the langue du jour. Using XML allows means the data associated with every "page" in the system automatically doubles as a service (SaaS). XSLT allows those those services to be translated into JSON, ASCII, PDF (via LaTeX), XML, or the format du jour. With this architecture, the amount of time to publish a new export format for every "page" in the system is reduced to the time it takes to write a new XSL template: hours to a few days. All pages can reuse the same code to render themselves: $data = get_xml( $id ); $xml = get_xml_dom( $data ); $xsl = get_xsl_dom( $stylesheet ); $proc = get_xslt_processor( $id, xsl ); echo $proc->transformToXML( $xml ); This cleanly separates business logic and the data model from presentation, plus much more. Perhaps it is masochism, though. ;-)