Re: Interactive XML

[Chris Lilley <chris@xxxxxx>]

Denis Hennessy wrote:

> >ECMAScript has no error handling, but a particular environment could
> >provide it, as the browser environments do today. The same can be done for
> >XSL.
> 
> Obviously, proprietary extensions could fix any problem but allowing
> alternate languages fixes it in a portable way.

Thats an interesting use of the word portable.

Even if the languages are extended to two - ECMAScript and Java 1.2, say
- that doubles the implementation load for anyone writing a conformant
implementation. Or alternatively, it requires softening the conformance
requirement and building in the expectation that implementations will
meet many compliant stylesheets that they can do nothing with. Best
styled with <insert XSL processor here>.

> Secondly, the browser capabilities object is only an example of what is
> useful here. Imagine a user preferences object describing whether the user
> wants frames or not, what fonts and colors to use, ...

Sounds an awful lot like a cascadable user stylesheet to me, except that
doing this on the server adds roundtrip latency, raises privacy concerns
about user profiling, decreases responsiveness and adaptability and
defeats HTTP cacheing.

--
Chris


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