[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] XSL in IE 5.0, or is it?
I've been working with IE 5.0 quite heavily this last week and I'm coming to the conclusion that there are at least three separate languages called XSL: 1. The one implemented by MSXSL which seems to mostly be a subset of the original XSL proposal 2. The current XSL proposal from the W3C which may be partially implemented by tools like Koala and FOP, though I haven't tested this personally 3. The language supported by IE 5.0 which seems at best tangentially related to the first two. In particular not only are almost all the elements supported by IE 5.0 not present in the W3C standard, and vice versa; but the examples of simple XSL stylesheets in the standard and the examples in IE 5.0 on Microsoft's Web site seem to be based on diametrically opposed philiosophies of how to transform XML to HTML. The standard seems to be based on transforming XML elements according to a series of rules. IE 5.0 seems to use a completely different scheme based on embedding XML data in an HTML template. (note: this is NOT the same as IE 5.0's XML data islands in HTML documents. I'm talking about the appearance of an XSL style sheet itself.) In other words, W3C embeds HTML to which XML will be transformed in XSL templates. IE 5.0 embeds XML data inside HTML via XSL elements. These two approaches just don't seem to be the same thing at all. Am I out to sea, here? I had previously gathered from discussions on this list that there were only a few miner differences like <eval> between IE 5.0 and the W3C draft, but after working with them they're like night and day. Is Microsoft simply going off on their own? If so, are they likely to come back to the fold before final release of IE 5.0? Or do they know something about future directions of XSL within the W3C that I don't? More access to current standards discussions would sure help a lot. But right now I'm very confused about what I should do. +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML: Extensible Markup Language (IDG Books 1998) | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764531999/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://sunsite.unc.edu/javafaq/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://sunsite.unc.edu/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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