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David Carlisle writes:
> Much as it pains me to support Microsoft I'd take exactly the oposite
> view here. I'd say that XML-on-the-web is distinctly uninteresting
> without a transformation language. My XML _never_ looks just like the
> presentation (for simple documents where that could be the case I'd
> just use (x)html anyway).
That's very odd to me, as about 97% of the XML I work with (including
the data) can be viewed usefully in a browser with just CSS -
display:table being particularly useful, but hardly the only case.
The only cases where I have a genuine problem involve some of my grosser
stupidities with putting content into attribute, a habit I got into
while writing SAX filters that I'm now trying to break.
On the Web, I think it's fair to say that most Web developers are quite
familiar with the case where document order is presentation order.
> So you require client side XSLT, until relatively recently that has
> only really worked in IE so in fact IE is a very capabable XML
> browser. Far from MicroSoft having a non-approach to XML in the
> browser, whether they like it or not they have a credible aproach. It
> could do with some tweaks, such as the default stylesheet doing
> something different with xhtml namespace but these are relatively
> minor issues.
Their handling of the XHTML namespace and mixtures of XML and XHTML is
execrable to put it mildly; I suppose that doesn't matter as much if you
plan to use XSLT to massage your data into something (HTML) their
browser actually can handle.
> The XSLT in mozilla and Netscape is now fortunately (at last) fairly
> robust (if not particularly fast) so we can finally put xml on the
> web with a reasonable chance that someone with a "new enough" browser
> can handle the thing. Of course not all browsers and platform are
> there yet but its early days: NS 7's only been out a couple of months
> or so in a full release, I still hope other systems will support this
> in the future.
And the CSS in Mozilla and Netscape (and to a lesser extent in Opera)
puts IE completely to shame for any XML application.
(Generally speaking, I think the Mozilla folks got it right as far as
integrating XML and HTML in the Web browser, though I'm fonder of
Opera's CSS-based linking than the simple XLink support in Mozilla.)
> As more clients become available I hope we will see more xslt styled
> xml on the web. Docbook for example...
I'm happy with CSS for pretty much all the direct DocBook reading I do
up to the point where ORA feeds it all into Frame.
-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether
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