Subject: Re: XSLT 1.0 support in browsers, as of June 2008
From: Robert Koberg <rob@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:34:57 -0400
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Hi,
Why do you want static content transformed in the browser?
I think I found the o;?rfc2629.xslt here:
http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629.xslt
I would bet your Opera problems are because it (still) does not support
the document function.
best,
-Rob
On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 10:04 +0200, Julian Reschke wrote:
> (this updates a summary I sent one year ago with the latest browser
> releases)
>
> Hi,
>
> recently, I hear the claim "XML on the web has failed" a lot. In
> particular, in the context of the HTML5 proposal worked on in the WHATWG
> WG, backed by Apple/Mozilla/Opera.
>
> Of course, this is not really true. A lot of XML is being exchanged
> through HTTP, be it in XML-RPC & SOAP (gasp), WebDAV, or RSS and Atom.
>
> It seems that most of the time people are referring to the support of
> XML in the browser, mainly with respect to XHTML (which indeed is a
> failure so far due to the fact that IE doesn't support it), and
> client-side XSLT.
>
> There are several ways to do client-side XSLT, one of which is through
> the xml-stylesheet processing instruction. For a long time, that worked
> only in IE, but nowadays support in Firefox, Opera and Safari is getting
> better. In fact, it has become so good that it can *almost* be used
> portably.
>
> The purpose of this mail is to document the current shortcomings of the
> implementations, as experienced by me supporting rfc2629.xslt (the
> RFC2629 XML format is used in the IETF for formatting Internet Drafts
> and RFCs). My experience is that it's incredibly hard to do complex
> stuff without either XSLT 1.1 (not finished), XSLT 2.0, or at least XSLT
> 1.0 + node-set extension function, therefore I'm looking at the node-set
> support as well...
>
>
> (1) Internet Explorer (MSXML)
>
> - It does implement msxsl:node-set, but it would be *really* great if it
> would also do exslt:node-set, which is supported by Opera and Firefox 3.
> Putting in special cases just for IE really is a pain. (*)
>
> 2008-06: we've got a solution to that one (thanks to David Carlisle):
> <http://dpcarlisle.blogspot.com/2007/05/exslt-node-set-function.html>
>
> - IE suffers from an IMHO bad decision to strip out whitespace before
> passing the XML document to the XSLT processor (see
> <http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms760265.aspx>). I understand
> that Microsoft can't simple change that without breaking deployed
> content, but it would be *really* cool if one could "opt out" of that
> behavior somehow (PI at the start of the document???).
>
> Summary: good, but room for improvement
>
>
> (2) Firefox
>
> - Works ok (although slow compared to IE), except for the lack of
> exslt:node-set, which will be fixed in Firefox3.
>
> Summary: will be good in next release
>
> 2008-06: Firefox 3 ships, and exslt:node-set works finally.
>
>
> (3) Opera
>
> - Has been improving a lot, and also has exslt:node-set since 9.2 (?),
> but the current release unfortunately aborts with a fatal error upon
> complex XPath expressions. Right now unusable for rfc2629.xslt (see
> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629xslt.html#opera>).
>
> Summary: please fix this, and your XSLT rocks.
>
> 2008-06: Opera 9.5 fixes this, but introduces a new bug (CSS not being
> applied to transformation result). Opera bug 337388.
>
>
> (4) Safari (and WebKit?)
>
> - I had no opportunity to test lately, but AFAIK it still lacks support
> for exslt:node-set (see
> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629xslt.html#safari>).
>
> 2008-06: exslt:node-set is there (as of Safari 3.1 I think).
>
>
> Julian
>
> (*) of course that problem could also be solved by Mozilla/Opera/Safari
> implementing msxsl:node-set().
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