Re: Netscape 6 lack of XSL support

["John E. Simpson" <simpson at polaris dot net>]

At 06:48 AM 04/06/2000 -0500, Mark Volkmann wrote:
> > Rather than supporting the formatting of XML documents through CSS1,
>Microsoft has chosen to focus on formatting through XSL. As Tim Bray, a
>co-editor of the XML specification has noted:
>
> > "Microsoft's XSL efforts are very impressive, but (readers will pardon us
>being something of a broken record on this subject) XSL is in the future."
>
> > He further adds, "It seems obvious to me that for anyone who wants to
>deploy XML in production mode right now, XML + CSS is the way to go."
>
>I think these are absurd statements! CSS is far too limited to use for
>presenting XML documents. It has zero transformation capabilities! Without
>the "content" feature of CSS2 it cannot add new content to the output. It
>can't sort. It can't reorder content. I've got to wonder if Tim Bray really
>said that last line, "XML + CSS is the way to go".

Yes, he really said that. It's a little misleading though for Netscape to 
be reproducing the remark verbatim, without saying what "right now" means. 
Tim's comment actually appeared in an article written for xml.com in 
October *1998*, reviewing the *original* IE5 support for XML-related 
technology.

At that time it was (IMO) indeed right to say what he said. And in some 
ways it's still right (although I agree with you on the superiority of 
XSLT): implementations of the *display* (i.e. formatting objects) standard 
are still over the horizon. It'd be a boon if browsers supported the 
years-old CSS better than they do. (Although Opera and Mozilla are doing a 
good job with it.) Even right now in mid-2000, it'd be great to have both 
transformation capabilities and a fully-implemented display standard.
================================================================
John E. Simpson          | "After they make styrofoam, what do
http://www.flixml.org    | they ship it in?" (Steven Wright)
simpson@polaris.net      |


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