RE: The Future of Browser-Bound XML?

Well, I won't try to second guess the browser companies, 
but I think what you stated is the goal -- you're just 
missing some of the 'possibilites' of it. 

[snipped from Joel Konkle-Parker]
> There's CSS... but a page displayed solely in CSS? Not very feasible.

With good CSS2 support, not so bad. In fact, certainly as 
good as what you do with HTML today. This option will (or 
would :( ) work well with better browser support. The newer
versions are getting there, but there's so many old versions
out there in the real world that this is not totally feasible 
today -- or just have browser aware output. And of course, 
it requires that your XML is already pretty much in order 
and fully complete for rendering. 

> 
> There's XSLT... much more powerful, but it basically just 
> converts your XML back
> to HTML... kind of defeats the purpose of doing away with 
> HTML in the first place?

Unfortunately, necessary for backwards compatibility with
browser versions -- but hopefully will become less and 
less of a requirement over the next 5 years. And you still 
can get the benefit of XML (such as reuse, more 'intelligent' 
content, etc.) in your information -- it's just the final 
output that's kind of dumb.

But there are also other options that are getting more 
realistic such as XSLT done on the client-side. The user gets
the XML but rendering still uses many of the HTML capabilities. 
And it opens up several other possibilities: 

* XSLT generates content that CSS just can't (i.e., your 
  XML is not fully complete or not ordered for rendering)
* you let your users interact with the XML and repeat the 
  transformation to see different versions, such as changing
  the sort order
* you have other XML-aware functions or applets that provide 
  better functionality, like say an XML-aware search engine. 
  Rendering still uses HTML, but search has access to the XML.

> 
> Then there's XSLFO... but from what I've read that's more 
> aimed at the printed
> word, and all the examples I've seen are diplayed as PDF files.

They are, and given how long CSS support has taken I wouldn't
bet on XSLFO support in browsers ever.

Sara

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