Re: [xml-dev] RE: James Clark: XML versus the Web

[Doug <doug.duboulay@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2010, Ben Trafford wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 10:31 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> > On 12/2/10 10:20 AM, David Lee wrote:
> > > I'll bite on this ...
> > > Conceptually, what is the difference between this suggestion (better
> > > CSS) then supporting XSLT in the browser ?
> >
> > Heh.  I'm not sure the conceptual differences matter as much as reusing
> > technology that's already widely implemented in browsers.
> 
> Precisely. The point is to enable XML with existing and well-understood
> technologies, to gain penetration with the widest audience possible and
> allow for the re-use of broadly understood technologies. XSLT is
> impenetrable to the average web developer.
> 
> --->Ben

Yeah, off-topic I know, but just throwing this out there, 
something, presumably trivial ...

I would like to see web browser support analogous to the 
leading stylesheet processing instruction, but for processing with
javascript (which *all* web developers understand!). 

i.e. instead of:
  <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
  <?xml-stylesheet href="convertXML2HTML.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>
  ...
why not promulgate:

  <?xml-javascript href="convertXML2HTML.js" type="text/javascript"?>

With this you could publish raw XML documents on the web and transform
them dynamically, client-side with javascript.

As a work around, for firefox, its currently possible to add an html 
namespace <html:script /> element as the penultimate node and  
coax it to process the preceeding XML content however you like 
(at cost of invalidating your XML document of course).

Unfortunately IE treats all XML as an "XML Data Island" - a flat 
list of unstructured opening and closing tags that need to be 
re-assembled into a DOM tree in order to do anything useful, 
including any embedded <html:script /> elements it contains :-/ 

A universally recognised javascript processing instruction could be 
a useful addition to the toolbox.

cheers
Doug