Re: What Bill hath wrought

Hi.

It's a debatable issue as to whether MS has done more harm or good to XSL.
It should be born in mind that their very early experiments with XSL in
IE4, and the native processing of XSL in IE5 has attracted a lot of
interest to XSL, and made it possible for a lot of developers to play with
this technology that otherwise might not have looked at it.

Personaly I think the same thing will happen with the MS implimentation of
XSL that happened with XML. Very flaky in IE4, and hopefuly 100% compliant
in IE5 on the 18th March. Maybe this time next year we'll be seeing 100%
compliant XSL in IE6.

As for Mozilla, I don't think this is even going into beta until June. By
the time it goes gold, and gets a 100% compliant XSL implimentation
(nothing has been mooted for this yet), remembering that XSL isn't going to
be complete until at leat August, I think we might be getting close to the
IE6 betas :)

Yes stylesheets have been hacked to work under IE5, but one could argue
that all XSL stylesheets are at present a hack.

On a broader level MS may well have done a lot of damage to the IT
industry, that's a seperate debate. On th issue of XML and XSL I think MS
have done an awful lot to popularise XML and now XSL, and should be
applauded for the amount of effort they have put into supporting this
technology in their browser, in what I feel to have been the most pragmatic
way they could.

As for the issue of selecting stylesheets, if the transformation is being
actuated programatically with JavaScript either on the server or the client
then the appropriate stylesheet could be selected. As for which parser one
is interacting with, this can again be decided upon programmaticaly.

Cheers
     Guy.





xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 03/17/99 01:21:26 AM

To:   xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc:    (bcc: Guy Murphy/UK/MAID)
Subject:  What Bill hath wrought




It occurs to me that XML files that reference XSL style sheets that have
been hacked to work under IE5, won't work under the new Mozilla browser or
if someone writes a plug-in around XT. In other words, you could get around
browser differences in JavaScript programatically, but how would you do
something similar with embedded style sheet references.
Is this a current problem with CSS?
[SNIP]




 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list