Subject: Re: XML on Gecko From: Chris Lilley <chris@xxxxxx> Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 12:09:59 +0200 |
"John E. Simpson" wrote: > > At 07:52 PM 3/31/99 +0200, Chris Lilley wrote: > >Yes, also both IE5 and Gecko support it (using CSS on XML documents) so, > >you can write one stylesheet and have it displayed, client-side, in both > >of those browsers and any others that support CSS and XML. > > One bitter disappointment in attempting to use CSS with either Gecko or IE5 > was that neither, apparently, supports generated text. Okay; I heard that the Mozilla developers were working on generated text (:before, :after, and numbering) but as you say, it isn't in the current builds. Thats where you can use XSL on the server side to make up the shortfall - add your generated text there, while keeping your original XML files. For example, you can do chapter, section, and subsection numbering in XSL, serving up some XML that is a numbered version of your original XML file. This lets you edit the original XML without having to fuss with renumbering when you add a section, and then use CSS to format and render the result. > That's a CSS2 feature yes; also, one of the last to settle down before CSS2 became a recommendation. Some of the other parts (like CSS Positioning) had been pretty stable as standalone working drafts for nearly a year before CSS2 became a recommendation. > (i.e., not CSS1, which itself isn't yet fully supported), also true, although the browsers are edging up to the 70% levels now. In terms of serving up Web pages today, that still gets you quite a lot (and feel free to mail your favourite browser vendor asking for the remaining 30%; feature prioritisation depends on customer feedback). Some of the buggy and quirky aspects are due to bugwards-compatible rendering hacks, designed to make current pages work at the expense of standards compliance; happily these only apply to HTML, so browsers tend to work better with CSS ad XML than they do with CSS and HTML. Of course, the combination of server-side XSL plus client-side CSS on XML is the real cracker. We are also finding that the CSS1 test suite has helped developers fine tune their implementations and get those percentages up. As I said, mailing vendors/implementors with specific requests for feature support, preferably citing a particular CSS1 test suite page that fails, is a good way to get that development prioritised. > so I > shouldn't have been too surprised. But it's such a useful feature that it > was a letdown not to have it. It is useful, I agree, and things will be better once it arrives. In the mean time, you can get the effect by using XSL transformations. -- Chris XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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