Are "pure" XML web sites finally possible?

[wige]

At the suggestion of a friend, I checked out a web site (wowarmory.com) last night that is, to my suprise, completely developed using xml data sheets rather than HTML or XTML web documents. Granted, from an SEO perspective, this site is less than ideal. There is no real content for a search engine to index, and the site is designed for performing database queries. However, this technology could easily be adapted for use by pretty much any web site. For example, my own sites use a similar technology to allow our XML files to be displayed as "normal" web pages if the visitor tries to view them in a compatible web browser.

Granted, there are a few issues with this technology. For instance, this method is not backwards compatible. However, there are many benefits - improved code to content ratios, the ability to reduce server load and bandwidth requirements, improved portability of content to various browsing platforms, etc.

Have any of you experimented with developing a purely XML web site? Have you been able to get the site deployed successfully? And have you found any additional benefits or challenges from using this method?

[kgun]

1. There can be browser problems with xml sites, that may indirectly hurt you in the SE's indexes.
2. There should be no problems for a SeBot to crawl, index and rank content on a purely XML based site. Even easier, since it has to be well-formed, that is contain no open and / or badly nested elements.
3. By analysing the XML Information Set of the xml document, it shoud be even easier to analyse its content.
4. I think the most advanced SeBots are well prepared for crawling XML sites. The browsers are lagging.
5. XML driven CMS systems have a clear advantage compared to a databasedriven CMS system. The content on files / pages can be directly crawled and indexed. Content in a database is not analyzed and indexed before it is pulled out of the database.
6. So static XML powered sites may have som advantages compared to dynamic databasedriven.
7. Security in XML documents are much more formal than in pure HTML documents.
8. In addition, how easy is it for SpamBots to crawl XML documents compared to pure HTML documents? HTML uses fixed known tags. XML uses a dynamic non fixed tag set. You can define your own tags.

Example: Browse the world wide web and start at BrowseToolbar.com

Click "Browse professional finance related links" in the upper left corner. The file is large, so it may take a long time to load on slow connections.

Note:

1. The document is XML.
2. The page is automatically generated by a free C++ tool if you paste in the Mr. Mirror ad on your site.
3. View source and note how simple the XSL file, op_xbel2html.xsl is. That is also automatically generated by the same tool.