RE: [xml-dev] XML support in browsers?

["Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>]

> XSLT failed to take off on the Web for one reason and one reason only:
> Microsoft Internet Explorer's failure (continuing to this 
> day) to properly implement the standard. 

That seems a little unfair. Microsoft introduced an implementation with a
pretty high level of conformance quite soon after the XSLT standard came
out. People were reluctant to use it initially because there were still a
lot of older browsers around, and later they were reluctant to use it
because support was absent or incomplete in non-Microsoft browsers. It's
taken nearly 10 years to reach the point where you can write Web
applications with reasonable confidence that the browser will support XSLT
1.0.

Sadly, this kind of inertia seems to be built-in to the web. We all have to
move at the pace of the slowest. But the slowest in this case was not
Microsoft: it was their users and their competitors.

I'm not quite sure what you have in mind with the "continuing to this day".
If you mean the minor glitches in the implementation such as whitespace
handling, well yes, they are regrettable, but they aren't a major factor in
determining the course of history.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay