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Re: Netscape XSL and ' charcter

Subject: Re: Netscape XSL and ' charcter
From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 11:54:38 -0400
a charcter studio download to
[Deshpande, Gururaj]
[Tom P]
> > Netscape 6+ is basically Mozilla with a few extras in the UI wrapper.
> > Mozilla is always more developed than Netscape 6.x.  Today's Mozilla
will
> > be
> > tomorrow's Netscape 6.y.  Thus, xslt support is more developed and less
> > buggy in Mozilla 0.9.9  (the current version) than in Netscape 6.2 (I
> > don't
> > recall now whether Netscape 6.2 actually contains TransforMiix - the
xslt
> > processor - or whether you have to install it yourself).
> >
> > I look at the current Netscape versions as beta versions.  Which version
> > on
> > Netscape do you think you should be supporting?
> >
> [Gururaj]  I have to write for Netscape 6.x. How and from where do I
> get TransforMiix - xslt processor ?


I don't know if you can still get it (the xslt processor) for older versions
of Netscape/Mozilla.  You will have to search around on the mozilla.org
site.  It comes built into the later versions of Mozilla, and it may be
built into Netscape 6.2, too.  If NS6.2 will transform any xml file using an
xslt stylesheet, then it's included, but of course it will be an older
version and may have more bugs.  I don't think that NS6.1 included it, but
you will want to check by testing it.

All versions on Mozilla since 0.9.6 or 0.9.7 have had it built in, if I
recall correctly.  I think you can take it as a given that you should be
supporting Mozilla because the next version of NS will essentially be
Mozilla (perhaps Mozilla 1.0), just as NS6.2 was some previous version of
Mozilla.

If you want the same code to work with IE and NS/Mozilla, you will have to
do a lot of testing, and remember the following things:

1) Most copies of IE5.0 and 5.5 use the older version of the Microsoft
xml/xslt processor.  It does not use xslt at all, but an older
Microsoft-specific dialect that thye call "xsl".  If a user has installed
msxml3 in replace mode, then xslt is supported.  You have to decide how or
whether to support IE users who do not have msxml3.

2) Microsoft added a lot of capabilities that are non-standard and no one
else has them.  This includes "data islands".  You have to avoid using any
of these capabilities if you want things to work on both IE and NS.  NS did,
however, include a few Microsoft-isms.  It's a little hard to track all this
down, so it's probably better to stick to standards-only things.

3) Microsoft and Mozilla sometimes use different names for the same API.
There are some CSS objects, for example, where the class names are a little
different.  The functionality is the same.  It is possible to write
javascript that adapts to these differences, but you have to do a lot of
testing to make sure everything works if you want to control CSS and the DOM
with javascript.

4) Make sure not to use any Microsoft-specific javascript versions.

5) NS/Mozilla does not have any of those Microsoft-specific data handling
capabilties like ADO, etc.

To summarise, you want to use plain, standard xslt and javascript if you
want everything to work with both browsers.  And even then, do a lot of
testing because they each have different sets of bugs to work around.
Simple things should work fine, though.

Cheers,

Tom P


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