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> I realize this doesn't change anything, but if-MSXML-do-This-otherwise-do-That
> spaghetti isn't going to kill the web, and we can probably sort out something
> better for the future.
True, have a look at http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/ which is a stylesheet
collection (mine) that does nothing but this to do whatever is necessary
to render XHTML+MathML on variety of browser/plugin combinations.
Actually I have no real objection to putting application specific code
in conditional sections of a stylesheet, but I have a big objection to
putting such code in the document.
However in the case of the white space dropping, there is nothing you
can do in the stylesheet at all. The parser gratuitously removes spaces
between words and you get no warning. This behaviour means that the
original vision of serving XML and having it transformed on the client
is seriously compromised, which is a shame as it's only really in the
last release of Mozilla that there has been a second browser other than
IE that reasonably supports client side stylesheets and one could have
hoped to serve XML in this way in a portable way.
The "solution" is to transform on the server and send HTML down the
wire. On the server of course you know what XSL engine is being used and
you can get whatever HTML you want, but that means you're just sending
presentation oriented HTML down the wire and in that case why was XML in
the loop at all? Could just have well had SGML at the back and used
DSSSL. XML was supposed to be SGML-light for serving over the web wasn't
it?
David
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