[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Browser support of XML standards (WAS: RE:Slightly off, but... was: XUL

• To: "J. David Eisenberg" <catcode@c...>,"Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer" <schnitz@m...>,"Stefano Debenedetti" <sdebenedetti@e...>
• Subject: Browser support of XML standards (WAS: RE:Slightly off, but... was: XUL appears to...)
• From: "Manos Batsis" <m.batsis@b...>
• Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 10:13:29 +0300
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
• Thread-index: AcInppXRirHLuKBiSjqObqZUnfNajwAN/Zjg
• Thread-topic: Browser support of XML standards (WAS: RE:Slightly off, but... was: XUL appears to...)

> From: J. David Eisenberg [mailto:catcode@c...] 

> Rather
> than compile in support for such things as MathML or need Microsoft's
> weird "binary behaviors" to put SVG into an XHTML page,

About behaviors, that's not SVG; that's the predecessor named VML
(vector markup language ;-)

> I propose
> "namespace plug-ins".
> 
> Consider: a browser now gets some MIME type that isn't 
> text/html, so it
> looks up the MIME type in a list of plug-ins and throws the 
> data to the
> appropriate plug-in, which returns some sort of result 
> through the plug-in
> API.

At first glance it's not a bad idea for pushing browsers a little
further but essentially you are actually talking about object tags
(without the object tag...). Native support is much better than this
approach; having different handlers for each subdocument has certain
disadvantages. Here's some:

* The plug-ins have to be specific for each browser (for example activeX
controls in IE). This is the main reason I dislike IE's XML support;
it's not actually in the browser but on a separate dll used as activeX
(msxml).
* You will never be certain on the level of communication between all
those different plug-ins.
* You will have to use DOM extensions for all the above.


> Why not have some API such that, when the browser hits markup with a
> namespace whose URI it's not equipped to handle, it throws 
> the data to a
> plug-in which returns a "box" with the appropriate display 
> (which might be
> a graphic for SVG, text and graphics for MathML, or an audio 
> control panel
> in the case of VoiceML) to the browser. All of this would be 
> done through
> some publicly-advertised API.

If that API is a standard instead of browser specific technology, sure.

Regards,

Manos

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: Browser support of XML standards (WAS: RE:Slightly off, but... was: XUL appears to...)
    • From: "bryan" <bry@i...>
  • RE: Browser support of XML standards (WAS: RE:Slightly off, but... was: XUL appears to...)
    • From: "Julian Reschke" <julian.reschke@g...>

• Prev by Date: RE: RE: data types
• Next by Date: RE: Browser support of XML standards (WAS: RE:Slightly off, but... was: XUL appears to...)
• Previous by thread: RE: data types
• Next by thread: RE: Browser support of XML standards (WAS: RE:Slightly off, but... was: XUL appears to...)
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread