Re: Is letting the browser transform XML to XHTML usin

Hello David,

Gee this thread is refreshing and you bring some good info David. I too got
involved in web development for quite sophisticated apps using the browser
as an execution sandbox. I can confirm your observation. We also discovered
that trying to develop a solution for browser on the first shot was very
very costly. Here is what we learned to do to reduce our costs:

a) target XSLT 1.0 and use no idiosyncratic features.
b) develop at first the behavioral side of our web apps (i.e ECMAScript) on
IE mainly because of the sophisticated debugger tools made available on this
platform. Here are the advantages we found:
	1- we can debug the result of an XSLT transform even if the result
of the transformation is ECMAScript source code (in addition to the
generated XHTML).
	2- When the browser encounter a problematic situation, it triggers
an exception, display a dialog if previously set to debug mode and let you
start the debugger, right at the problematic point.
	3- excellent documentation in the MSDN electronic books.
c) then when we reached a stable app in IE we port to other platforms. In
fact this is the very same technique you would do if you develop in java
targeting a Websphere J2EE server running over the IBM VM and port your
software on JBOSS running onver the sun VM. Believe me there are huge
differences between these two platforms. The common point? The illusion
we've been told and bullshit we heard about write once and run everywhere
with both web technologies and java technologies.

So, like it is the case for other technologies, you develop on one platform
and then you port on others.

Cheers
Didier PH Martin