Re: International Characters in attributes

On Monday, February 12, 2001 11:43 AM
David Carlisle wrote:

> But it seems to me that the encoding support in
> XML (ie unicode everywhere) is designed to pull us out of this mess,
and
> the only thing to do is produce conforming documents and then
pressure
> the browsers to conform.

Medium to long term, I 100% agree. Short term I see things slightly
differently. What this discussion has clarified for me is that what
I'm doing with XSLT is a kind of compromise that lets me say to
document authors: "OK, mark up in XML, follow the standards to the
letter, and get it right. One day, when the world is full of true XML
browsers, your users will be certain to see what you want them to see.
For the time being, give me your XML and some beer money, and I'll
hack together some XSLT that will give all the poor folk out there
with cruddy browsers a decent chance of seeing something not totally
unlike those XML browers will see, come the Revolution".

But of course, you could say that I'm removing the incentive to get
proper browsers on to desktops. I suppose it's my long disillusioning
experience of IT policies in the University sector that makes me say
that if a boxful of free, wholly standards-compliant and bugless XML
browsers were delivered to every University in the world tomorrow, in
5 years time they would still be having committee meetings to decide
whether to open the box with scissors or a knife.

Michael
------------------------------------------
Michael Beddow
http://www.mbeddow.net/



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