[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Bad News on IE6 XML Support
>There are work-arounds for the things the CSS folks haven't reached, like OK, on this thread we have seen people make some pretty vague and sweeping generalizations; I have seen claims that IE has the best CSS support, Netscape, and now we are talking about Opera. So I might as well add my own. I have found that I can use client-side (or server-side) XSLT to transform XML into well-formed HTML using CSS, and have been able to do most of what I want in most cases. This is provided that I use XSLT to do the structural transformation and CSS just for "styles". I have also found that practically any CSS feature that really would have made my life easier was completely un-implemented on *any* browser -- these are features like the selectors that let you insert content before or after, so are not exactly "style" oriented anyway. There are some other issues, like performance of CSS on large documents, that have forced me to use other solutions at times. These are some big problems that have no workarounds that I am aware of, other than not using CSS. I am sorry, but from my experience, I don't really think *any* browser can claim to have "good" CSS support. Or else "good" is a really subjective word. If you stick to simple lowest-common-denominator stuff, it's "OK". But that is about as far as I would go. For anything beyond simple styles, the "remaining barriers" are formidable. >We aren't that far from having XML+CSS representing a step up from >(X)HTML+CSS. There's just one browser standing largely in the way. I've Well, this brings up the question of why we need XHTML in the first place, if we can just attach CSS to XML? Actually, I think that browser support for putting CSS on XML is actually *better* than support for XHTML. Sure CSS support in general is not so great, but it is easy for example to just produce a well-formed XML document that is all <span /> tags with the original element/tag name becoming the class="" attribute. This is just a slight modification to the XSLT identity transform and then even Opera can render this XML correctly with CSS. This adheres to the idea of letting XSLT do structural transform, and letting CSS apply style to the structure (separation of presentation and content, etc.). XHTML seems (to me) to sort of violate the separation by making tags like <i>, and <b> that actually have presentation semantics implied. So personally I choose to just use the identity-transform trick to let me apply style to well-formed XML without mushing the meanings (and it works in all browsers today). Again I may be off-base, but since you mention that XML+CSS is a step up from (X)HTML+CSS (and I strongly agree), I am wondering why more people do not just go there?
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