SQL for presentation

At this forum, it is often claimed that almost all kind of data transformation could be done using SQL select statements. It is also claimed that the "business logic" should be implemented in the database as views and the application on top of the database only should be responsible for presentation (and communication).

In web applications, the presentation - HTML - is a data structure. If select statements could make almost any kind of data transformation, why couldn't we use select statements to produce the HTML text? I see a problem in the fact that HTML is hierachial and select statements doesn't seem suitable for returning hierachial results. But what if a relational version of HTML existed, would the select statement be suitable for buildning the GUI too?

/Fredrik Received on Wed Jul 05 2006 - 04:43:16 CDT