RE: Microsoft XSL and Conformance

Subject: RE: Microsoft XSL and Conformance
From: Ben Robb <Ben@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 10:15:21 -0000
Andy Kimball wrote:
> As I receive feedback from the XSL community, I've been 
> surprised at how
> vocal and passionate people are about conformance

I think that the point people are trying to make about conformance is that
we don't particularly want to go back to the bad old days of browser
non-conformance to the W3C standards. Are there any internet developers out
there who haven't cursed when something works perfectly well in one browser,
but doesn't in any other? With neither JavaScript nor (D)HTML behaving in
the same way in NS or IE, it triples development time (at least) and
frequently means I have to do a browser-detect and have duplicate sites for
the different browsers.

XSLT is a shiny new language, and it has a standard. If everyone agrees to
stick to it, we can move towards the utopia of cross-platform and
cross-client transparency. If we don't, then the last year or so has been a
waste of time for me; I may as well have stuck to HTML and JavaScript -
since XSLT will not become the universal language everyone hopes it will.

Despite the fact I've been using XML/XSL since late 1998, I still use new
ideas and use parts of the language I previously thought of as
"insignificant" in almost every new project. So I would quite like them to
be available if a client insists on using a particular parser... or decides
to port to another platform down the line.

Having said all of that, I still use the MS parser for all my "simple"
solutions, because it is by far the easiest for rapid application
development - in the end, I simply do not have the time (or the patience) to
get the other parsers working quickly on live servers (unless I really have
to...). With MS, I simply install the component and then I can call it from
any ASP page.

Just my $0.02 worth *grin*

Ben


+++
Ben Robb
Project Leader 
cScape Strategic Internet Solutions
+++


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