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RE: Re: Microsoft XML
At 1:23 PM -0700 8/15/01, Joshua Allen wrote:
>1) Microsoft fully implements XML 1.0, XSLT 1.0 (and XPath). If you
>feel there are conformance bugs in these implementations, please let us
>know, because our goal is to be 100% conforming.
>
Did I miss the announcement where you were actually shipping a conforming XML parser and XSLT processor with the current versions of IE and Windows? Microsoft has a long history of shipping radically nonconforming XML software with the tools people actually use. That was certainly true when Brett's book was published and for a long time afterwards. Unless something has changed very recently, (I haven't checked out SP2 for IE5.5 yet) you're still doing it. Even in MSXML 3.0 (which is not what IE uses by default) you still don't recognize the correct MIME media type for XSLT style sheets. There is no such MIME media type as text/xsl. Never has been. Probably never will be, except in Microosft's imagination.
But that's a minor issue. The real problem is that Microsoft is a very large company with different groups going in different directions. The XML team is more or less on the ball most of the time. However, very few people have any direct interaction with the XML team or its products. Instead most people experience XML in MS products through the work of the IE team, or the Windows team, or Microsoft speakers and trainers. Guess what? They aren't on the ball, and they don't know what's going on, and they are still evangelizing and distributing technologies that the XML team abandoned years ago. That's slowly changing, but not nearly as fast as it should be.
Bottom line: that MSXML 4.0 or 3.0 is more or less conformant to the various specs is irrelevant. What matters is what you're actually shipping to end users. If you ship end users non-conformant implementations, then you will rightfully be castigated. (With apologies to Douglas Adams) Hiding a conforming beta somewhere in the basement of your web site, through a door marked "Danger! Radioactive Waste. Do Not Enter", and inside a box labeled "Flesh eating bacteria: Do not open under penalty of death" does not absolve you of your sins.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
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