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Re: XML support in browsers?

• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@ibiblio.org>
• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
• Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 06:43:54 -0700

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 6:59 AM, Simon St.Laurent<simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:

> Yes, of course you can use XSLT on the Web, but there's very little evidence
> that its creators paid attention to how web sites and applications are
> normally built, to the existence of a prior stylesheet language that's
> vastly easier to get started with, or to the general level of programming
> expertise historically required to build these applications.  It never
> really fit.

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. Had it been possible to use XSLT
directly on the client side, we'd be working with a very different Web
today.

No, XSLT was not a perfect fit for the Web as it exists today, but it
was a damn sight better than anything else we had in 1999, HTML, CSS,
and JavaScript included. Had XSLT not been blocked by Microsoft, the
other pieces of the puzzle would have fallen into place. Search
engines would have learned to index raw XML, and browser vendors would
eventually have worked around the W3C's inevitable stasis,
bureaucracy, and disregard for actual users as they now have with HTML
5 and JavaScript.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@ibiblio.org

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XML support in browsers?
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
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    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>

• References:
  • XML support in browsers?
    • From: Dan Vint <dvint@dvint.com>
  • RE: XML support in browsers?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>
  • RE: XML support in browsers?
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  • RE: XML support in browsers?
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  • Re: XML support in browsers?
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>