Re: Readily Available Parsers

Hi Exide,

> I have been using Microsoft.XMLDOM in my Javascript to parse the
> XML/XSL into HTML. After beat'n my head against google.com, and
> about an hour later, i read that the Microsoft.XMLDOM is just MSXML
> 2.0. I also found that MSXML 2.0 doesn't support the ability to pass
> a variable from ASP(or JavaScript) to an XSL via tha <xsl:param>
> command.

Yes, and that's not all. MSXML 2.0 supports an outwardly similar but
actually totally different language than XSLT. See the MSXML FAQ at
http://www.netcrucible.com/xslt/msxml-faq.htm if you haven't got to it
already.

> Goin on what i said before, is there a commonly available parser
> that people can use, that they dont have to download, in order to
> pass variables to an XSL. Preferably i dont want the end user to
> have to download anything in order to view the site.

If you don't want the *user* to download anything, then you're
probably best off using a server-side processor, either dynamically or
in batch transformations such that you actually put up the results of
the transformation on the website.

Good frameworks for server-side transformations are:

  - MSXML3sp2 or MSXML4 (which do support XSLT), used in combination
    with ASP (http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml)

  - Cocoon, a Java servlet (http://xml.apache.org/cocoon)

  - AxKit, a Perl module for Apache (http://www.axkit.org)

Good processors for batch processing are:

  - Saxon (http://saxon.sourceforge.net)
  - Xalan-J (http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j)
  - MSXML3 or MSXML4 with the command line wrapper "msxsl"
    (http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml)

But there are many more. See http://www.xmlsoftware.com/xslt.html for
a list but note that they are not all fully conformant.
  
If you do want to do client-side transformations, then for the minimum
hassle the user will have to have either IE6, Netscape 6.1 or Mozilla
already installed (and Netscape 6.1 only just manages most XSLT
transformations, plus of course the two browsers use different DOMs so
the same script won't work in both). You could use client-side
transformations with IE5+ but the user would have to download MSXML3
(and install it in replace mode unless you run all the transformations
through script).

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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