Creating forum applications in ASP using databases is simple and efficient, but it has some disadvantages -- to name a few, it's not easy to delete messages, the disk space that hosts the web application often doesn't have a database server, and the application can put great stress on the server resources.
Since the message structure and the XML structure are both tree based, in some cases it may be more appropriate to use an XML--based forum. In this article, author Claudio Masieri explains how you can achieve this by using XSL and transforming the XML into HTML on the client side. This approach reduces the use of server resources and allows the development of a forum with high--speed access to messages.
