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

[Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>]

On Dec 2, 2010, at 07:20, David Lee wrote:

> Conceptually, what is the difference between this suggestion (better CSS) then supporting XSLT in the browser ?

The fundamental differences between CSS and XSLT in browsers are:

 1) Every modern browser is already an interactive CSS formatter. Browsers don't (and very, very probably won't) support XSL-FO. Current XSLT capabilities in browsers involve transforming to HTML instead of FO and the resulting HTML is formatted using CSS.

 2) CSS makes sense with incremental DOM changes. The CSS box tree updates when the DOM changes and the DOM stays there for changing. XSLT hasn't been designed for maintaining a continuous and incrementally updating relationship between the input and output trees. In practice, XSLT runs once and thereafter the input tree is no longer available for incremental updates.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/