Re: Rant : "Microsoft is compliant with the XSL spec"

Subject: Re: Rant : "Microsoft is compliant with the XSL spec"
From: Warren Hedley <w.hedley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 10:38:12 +1200
I couldn't resist addressing a couple of things, and raising a new question.

Richard Bell wrote:
> 
> Frankly, the amount of time and energy spent by
> developers in this organisation, and I am sure many others, exchanging petty
> digs @ Microsoft is scandalous. Look it's easy ... if you don't like
> Microsoft's products don't use them.

I don't. I use pretty much nothing but Irix - one of the few major OS's to have
escaped IE - hoorah :-> - I write for Netscape only, and make a point of not
testing my pages in IE. I don't believe my report falls into the category of
a "petty dig" - I sat through 4 hours of M$ lying to around 100 developers
about how great their software was.

> You know their parser isn't fully
> compliant with the spec right now, so you don't need to go to a conference
> to find that out and then whinge about it.

I didn't want to go - my boss made me. The whinging was just therapy.

Dan Morrison wrote:
> 
> Warren Hedley wrote:
> > [a very well-written, balanced article]

Balanced? Re-reading my post today, I realised I'm starting to sound
like some kind of conspiracy theorist. People probably think I go home
and burn BG in effigy.

I apologise if this thread turns into pure M$-bashing. I actually think
that some of the ideas presented were quite good - I just objected to
the misinformation, particularly regarding standards compliance.

> Sounds like you handled your issues appropriately. I'd have been v.
> noisy ;-)

The presenter was a nice enough guy - he just didn't know his stuff.
I didn't really want to ruin his and everyone else's day.

> What were they selling?
> If the namespace was out of date, I guess it wasn't the XML component.

I'm not sure, probably IE5. Most of the people there were database
types and all got excited whenever SQL-server was mentioned.

On a different note:

I actually quite liked the idea of data islands: <xml> tags within an
<body> element that may contain data or stylesheets. We were told "no
more <object> tags", which I didn't like, but on reviewing the HTML 4
loose DTD, I see that <object> tags can only contain <param>s and %flow;
objects anyway, so it appears you can't legally embed XML in a HTML 4
document.

What I want to know is: is there a way to do the data island thing
without breaking HTML 4 compliance? If not, then M$ probably did the
right thing, although introducing an <xml> tag probably breaks XML
compliance (Section 3. Logical Structures.) Anyone care to suggest
a solution?

Thanks.


-- 
Warren Hedley


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