Re: [xsl] A simple XSLT transformation -> XForms output

[Andrew Watt <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 00:57 19/04/2003 -0400, you wrote:
> This is cool, but what about people who want to support browsers other 
> than X-Smiles?

Simon,

My strategy for a new technology tends to be to focus my time on one 
implementation - hopefully the fullest implementation -  and get a 
progressively better feel for what it will do and what it won't.

Like Saxon 7.x and XSLT 2.0, X-Smiles seems to be the quickest to implement 
new features after a new WD comes out. Miko Honkalla of X-Smiles is on the 
XForms WG.

There are about a dozen implementations listed on the W3C site. There was 
an implementers' meeting about a month ago. There are said to be about 24 
implementations (presumably of various states of readiness), but the last 
time I looked the W3C page hadn't been updated to reflect these additional 
implementations.

X-Smiles also allows playing with XSL-FO which may be of interest to some 
on this list. Some of the XForms examples on X-Smiles use XSL-FO and XForms.


> Is there a public XSLT library out there to convert XForms to HTML?

Not that I am aware of. But see below.

> When I analysed the situation about 6 months ago it seemed like XForms was 
> a waste of time until there's an implementation in a regular browser. And 
> even then, the functionality can be reproduced (it seems to me) without 
> needing XForms, thus, the browser support will probably lag behind 
> genuinely novel things like SVG support. So, I decided to go with regular 
> HTML forms.

I don't necessarily share the assumption that everything has to happen in 
the regular browser. But that, almost certainly, is off topic and could be 
a long discussion.

IBM alphaworks released a few days ago an implementation for normal 
browsers - more specifically it was designed to display in IE 5.5+ with 
MSXML 4 Sp1. Which I had but the supplied examples didn't work without 
scripting errors. IBM's response was that my errors were due to not having 
MSXML 4 Sp1, which I could see the correct DLLs were there and the 
Properties indicated they were the correct version.

So, if the IBM implentation will work for you (which it didn't for me) you 
might like to explore it.

Andrew Watt



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