Re: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 01:36 AM 9/8/2001 -0700, Christopher R. Maden wrote:
>At 22:51 7-09-2001, XML Everywhere wrote:
>>Client-side XSL?
>>
>>What are you smoking?
>>
>>XSLT is great.  Just don't do it on the client.
>>Transform your XML on the server.
>
>So XML Everywhere Except The Browser, then?

No, CSS works quite nicely for XML in browsers - Mozilla is a nice example, 
Opera's not too much further off (if they fixed Unicode support, anyway!)

IE is a long ways further off, and probably the main blockage for such 
usage today.

There are work-arounds for the things the CSS folks haven't reached, like 
image inclusions, and progress on some other areas - XForms, or just 
workarounds for using HTML forms - that are the remaining barriers.

We aren't that far from having XML+CSS representing a step up from 
(X)HTML+CSS.  There's just one browser standing largely in the way.  I've 
been told a few times that it's because their object model knows too much 
HTML, and a re-factoring would take too much effort.  (That's the polite 
way of expressing it, anyway.)

XSLT is useful, but I can't see myself telling graphic designers at WEB2001 
(where I presented yesterday) that they _have_ to learn XSLT to get XML 
information to a browser.  These aren't the people I want throwing rotten 
tomatoes at me.

Simon St.Laurent
Associate Editor
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.