Re: [xsl] Understanding XSLT Questions

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 1	Why does XSLT 1.0 have relatively poor string handling capabilities?

It's a bit of an open question:-)
but a couple of reasonable guesses.

a) It's version 1 of a language: more features can be added later (XSLT 2
   has more string handling)

b) In general XSLT 1 isn't designed to be optimal for "Up Translation"
   ie going from less structure to more structure. It's primary design
   goal was (explictly) "down translation" where you are styling highly
   structured XML down to XSL FO (or HTML or text or whatever). If all
   your structure is marked up in your XML source you don't need
   extensive string handling. Of course XSLT go used for far more things
   than its original designers might have imagined...


  2	When attempting to view an XML document that contains an invalid
  character (for the encoding) in IE it complains that the XML document is
  invalid and displays nothing.  However in Firefox the document is rendered
  but the character is shown as a black diamond containing a question mark.
  Shouldn't Firefox reject the document?

yes (harsh but true) well actually that "yes" has to be slightly
conditional. The XML spec says that is a fatal error, so the xml parser
is not supposed to make any automatic correction it has to stop and
report an error. But a web browser is far more than an xml parser, if
that decides to trap the error, fix the input by putting a bad character
marker there and then restarting the XML parse, that is probbaly out of
scope for any spec to outlaw.

  3	Where's the documentation for the Transformiix XSLT engine that's
  embedded in Firefox? 

"Use the source, Luke..."
there's a bit of top level documentation on the mozilla site.
> What extensions are supported? 
none
> Is it scriptable, etc?
yes see above

google
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=transformiix+xslt+script&meta=
would have lead you fairly quuickly to the interface description to
javascript
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xslt/js-interface.html

> Most links seem to point to the Netscape DevEdge 
odd, where were you looking?

google is your friend...

David

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