Re: Microsoft XSL and Conformance

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000 01:36:55 -0800, Andrew Kimball wrote:

>As I receive feedback from the XSL community, I've been surprised at how
>vocal and passionate people are about conformance (of course, people also

If you work in a multi-platform, multi-browser, multi-compiler world (i.e., not
ONLY Microsoft ;), you would be passionate, too.

My major requirements for such wide-spread (read: cannot avoid them, they're
used out there) tools as IE5 are:

a) be conformant as fast as possible and as close as possible

b) if you extend, provide a means to switch it OFF (globally, and per-document)

c) if b) is not possible for any reason, make it transparent (i.e. you lose some
feature, but it still basically works)

Especially b) is a thing that always bugged me about IE5, namely its tendency to
look at the URI extension first, when it should look at the Content-Type.

Practical consequence:

When you serve a PDF from an XML source (via Cocoon), NetScape displays it
properly using the PDF plugin, and IE (tada!) shows an empty page. I did not use
Netscape for over a year, btw, until I started doing XML.



Ciao, Jürgen

--
Jürgen Hermann (jhe@xxxxxxxxxxx)
WEB.DE AG, Amalienbadstr.41, D-76227 Karlsruhe
Tel.: 0721/94329-0, Fax: 0721/94329-22



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