Re: XSLT 1.0 support in browsers, as of June 2008

Hi,

Why do you want static content transformed in the browser?

I think I found the o;?rfc2629.xslt here:
http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629.xslt

I would bet your Opera problems are because it (still) does not support
the document function.

best,
-Rob


On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 10:04 +0200, Julian Reschke wrote:
> (this updates a summary I sent one year ago with the latest browser 
> releases)
> 
> Hi,
> 
> recently, I hear the claim "XML on the web has failed" a lot. In 
> particular, in the context of the HTML5 proposal worked on in the WHATWG 
> WG, backed by Apple/Mozilla/Opera.
> 
> Of course, this is not really true. A lot of XML is being exchanged 
> through HTTP, be it in XML-RPC & SOAP (gasp), WebDAV, or RSS and Atom.
> 
> It seems that most of the time people are referring to the support of 
> XML in the browser, mainly with respect to XHTML (which indeed is a 
> failure so far due to the fact that IE doesn't support it), and 
> client-side XSLT.
> 
> There are several ways to do client-side XSLT, one of which is through 
> the xml-stylesheet processing instruction. For a long time, that worked 
> only in IE, but nowadays support in Firefox, Opera and Safari is getting 
> better. In fact, it has become so good that it can *almost* be used 
> portably.
> 
> The purpose of this mail is to document the current shortcomings of the 
> implementations, as experienced by me supporting rfc2629.xslt (the 
> RFC2629 XML format is used in the IETF for formatting Internet Drafts 
> and RFCs). My experience is that it's incredibly hard to do complex 
> stuff without either XSLT 1.1 (not finished), XSLT 2.0, or at least XSLT 
> 1.0 + node-set extension function, therefore I'm looking at the node-set 
> support as well...
> 
> 
> (1) Internet Explorer (MSXML)
> 
> - It does implement msxsl:node-set, but it would be *really* great if it 
> would also do exslt:node-set, which is supported by Opera and Firefox 3. 
> Putting in special cases just for IE really is a pain. (*)
> 
> 2008-06: we've got a solution to that one (thanks to David Carlisle): 
> <http://dpcarlisle.blogspot.com/2007/05/exslt-node-set-function.html>
> 
> - IE suffers from an IMHO bad decision to strip out whitespace before 
> passing the XML document to the XSLT processor (see 
> <http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms760265.aspx>). I understand 
> that Microsoft can't simple change that without breaking deployed 
> content, but it would be *really* cool if one could "opt out" of that 
> behavior somehow (PI at the start of the document???).
> 
> Summary: good, but room for improvement
> 
> 
> (2) Firefox
> 
> - Works ok (although slow compared to IE), except for the lack of 
> exslt:node-set, which will be fixed in Firefox3.
> 
> Summary: will be good in next release
> 
> 2008-06: Firefox 3 ships, and exslt:node-set works finally.
> 
> 
> (3) Opera
> 
> - Has been improving a lot, and also has exslt:node-set since 9.2 (?), 
> but the current release unfortunately aborts with a fatal error upon 
> complex XPath expressions. Right now unusable for rfc2629.xslt (see 
> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629xslt.html#opera>).
> 
> Summary: please fix this, and your XSLT rocks.
> 
> 2008-06: Opera 9.5 fixes this, but introduces a new bug (CSS not being 
> applied to transformation result). Opera bug 337388.
> 
> 
> (4) Safari (and WebKit?)
> 
> - I had no opportunity to test lately, but AFAIK it still lacks support 
> for exslt:node-set (see 
> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629xslt.html#safari>).
> 
> 2008-06: exslt:node-set is there (as of Safari 3.1 I think).
> 
> 
> Julian
> 
> (*) of course that problem could also be solved by Mozilla/Opera/Safari 
> implementing msxsl:node-set().