RE: HOWTO: Internet Explorer conditional comments in X

I'm not sure you emphasize strongly enough the key limitation in this
approach: in the data model, comments cannot contains elements, they can
only contain strings; so you need to construct your content as a string in
which the markup is hand-generated. If the stuff between IE's conditional
comments gets complicated then this is going to become a pain, especially if
you have to produce it by modifying existing stylesheets that were designed
to produce the content as real element trees.

The stuff on result-tree-fragments is a bit tangential. The content could
just as well be a string. There's no special RTF "magic" here. All that's
happening is that when a string contains the "<" character, and the string
is used to form the body of a comment, the "<" is left as a "<" and isn't
escaped to "&lt;".

Incidentally, you also have to worry about the fact that the comment can't
contain "--" (and therefore, can't contain nested comments).

Michael Kay 
http://www.saxonica.com/


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Fitzsimons [mailto:nick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 31 October 2005 18:34
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  HOWTO: Internet Explorer conditional comments 
> in XSLT 1.0
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> With the forthcoming arrival of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft are
> exhorting people[1] to use IE's conditional comments[2] to 
> apply their CSS
> hacks.
> 
> It seems from comments at Dave Shea's Mezzoblue[3] that some 
> people have
> had trouble generating conditional comments using XSLT, so 
> I've written up
> how to do it:
> <http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/2005/10/27/ie-conditional-comments-
> in-xslt-10/>
> 
> I hope this isn't considered OT, but it occurred to me that 
> there must be
> people subscribing to the list who have faced this problem, 
> so I thought
> it might help. Feel free to castigate me and correct my 
> mistakes, whether
> through my comments form or via email.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Nick.
> 
> [1]<http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/10/12/480242.aspx>
> [2]<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/worksho
> p/author/dhtml/overview/ccomment_ovw.asp>
> [3]<http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/10/13/bye_bye_tan_/
> #c012563>
> 
> 
> -- 
> Nick Fitzsimons
> http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/