RE: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

[Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

>There are work-arounds for the things the CSS folks haven't reached,
like 

OK, on this thread we have seen people make some pretty vague and
sweeping generalizations; I have seen claims that IE has the best CSS
support, Netscape, and now we are talking about Opera.  So I might as
well add my own.  I have found that I can use client-side (or
server-side) XSLT to transform XML into well-formed HTML using CSS, and
have been able to do most of what I want in most cases.  This is
provided that I use XSLT to do the structural transformation and CSS
just for "styles".  I have also found that practically any CSS feature
that really would have made my life easier was completely un-implemented
on *any* browser -- these are features like the selectors that let you
insert content before or after, so are not exactly "style" oriented
anyway.  There are some other issues, like performance of CSS on large
documents, that have forced me to use other solutions at times.  These
are some big problems that have no workarounds that I am aware of, other
than not using CSS.  I am sorry, but from my experience, I don't really
think *any* browser can claim to have "good" CSS support.  Or else
"good" is a really subjective word.  If you stick to simple
lowest-common-denominator stuff, it's "OK".  But that is about as far as
I would go.  For anything beyond simple styles, the "remaining barriers"
are formidable.

>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 

Well, this brings up the question of why we need XHTML in the first
place, if we can just attach CSS to XML?  Actually, I think that browser
support for putting CSS on XML is actually *better* than support for
XHTML.  Sure CSS support in general is not so great, but it is easy for
example to just produce a well-formed XML document that is all <span />
tags with the original element/tag name becoming the class="" attribute.
This is just a slight modification to the XSLT identity transform and
then even Opera can render this XML correctly with CSS.  This adheres to
the idea of letting XSLT do structural transform, and letting CSS apply
style to the structure (separation of presentation and content, etc.).
XHTML seems (to me) to sort of violate the separation by making tags
like <i>, and <b> that actually have presentation semantics implied.  So
personally I choose to just use the identity-transform trick to let me
apply style to well-formed XML without mushing the meanings (and it
works in all browsers today).  Again I may be off-base, but since you
mention that XML+CSS is a step up from (X)HTML+CSS (and I strongly
agree), I am wondering why more people do not just go there?