RE: DSSSL future

["Didier PH Martin" <martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John

<YourComment>
My own view is that the ultimate vision of allowing client-selection of
which stylesheet(s) to apply to a given xml/sgml datastream is best by far.
The industry seems to be going in this direction based on the work being
done with HTML 4.0 and XSL. A server side transform only seems to me to be
useful for down-version browsers, i.e., it is a temporary fix to the
problem of people using browsers that are not enabled for style
transformations. I believe that there is so much processing power on the
requestor side that it is practically uneconomic to do transformations on
the server. I say, let the clients do as much work as they can.
</YourComment>

<Reply>
Point a) client station have plenty of power to do local processing. Yes,
indeed some workstations are even more powerful than some servers.
point b) a temporary fix is to have processing done on server side because
of the legacy. According to overall market browser renewal, it takes about
two years to attain 90% penetration for the new release (in a specific
market like IE or Mozilla, not the overall market). So the acceptance is a
lot slower than we think. I guess we have no choice than provide a server
side solution for a least the next two years. But as soon as we have the
right numbers, we will be able to move on.
point c) clients can choose their style. This is not a trend taken by
browser manufacturers. Actually, in the case of XSL, the only style sheet
used is the one referred by the processing instruction. Current specs says
nothing about a choice mechanism so by default browsers provide none, this
is why I started a thread on this topic. To explore ways to give back choice
to users and way for publishers to provide such choice.
</Reply>

thanks for your comment

Regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.netfolder.com


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