If I use XSLT will I get HTML pages?

Question

I was watching this course online and it went into xml. We used XSLT to take an XML doc and an XSL doc and get a page that displays in the browser. However, there was no HTML page anywhere, unless it only exists temporarily for the browser to display it.

Suppose you are developing RDF applications or publishing RDF linked data and you want RDFa, which is XHTML with RDF specified in the attributes. How would this be accomplished?
Maybe it would run on the server and actually save the resulting XHTML file, or more correctly the XHTML with RDFa document.
Can someone explain how this works? I want to have RDFa documents that can be indexed by search engines and I have RDF files in XML format. Thanks, Bruce

Answer 1

If you're doing the XSLT transformation on the server and sending HTML back to the browser, search engine spiders will see the same HTML that a browser would. Doesn't matter that it's dynamically generated (rather than stored in an HTML file) on the server.

If you publish the actual XML files from the server and you're relying on the browser to do the XSLT transformation into HTML, a good spider will probably do the same thing, but if you're publishing raw XML, why not just publish the RDF that way? You don't need to put it into HTML.