Re: XML/XSL on the client for dynamic UI

Subject: Re: XML/XSL on the client for dynamic UI
From: "Terris" <terris@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 06:55:37 -0700
If your objective is to support multiple
browsers, then you have to generate
HTML on the server.  There is no
other way.  Mozilla does not support
data islands, DSOs, XML, or XSL, and might
not ever.  Or, it might soon but nobody
is upgrading their Mozilla browsers because
Netscape no longer exists and it
remains to be seen whether AOL wants
to compete in the browser space
(not likely).

If you are bullish about Microsoft
and Win32, then go for it.  You will
still have a wide audience.

Since XSLT authoring tools are lacking 
you will have a hard time getting "content
people" to switch to this new world view.
The HTML they produce will for
most purposes just be an "example".
You'll have to reverse-engineer the
examples into stylesheets.  Not a lot
of fun.  For the last few years 
web engineers have been forcing content
people to put mysterious tags into their
HTML.  Now we're asking them to
switch to XML and create stylesheets that
produce HTML.  It's going to take
time and tools, as all paradigm shifts do.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <oberthier@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <XSL-List@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 1999 4:05 AM
Subject: XML/XSL on the client for dynamic UI



Apart from the capability of applying XSL style sheets on the
server to provide the client with HTML pages dynamically
created from an XML source, I'm currently trying to explore
the capability of a more integrated XML/XSL couple on the
client itself to provide the user with a powerful user 
interface.

The goal is quite simple, actually heritated from the
experience of traditional client-server applications for 
which the link between data (in an RDBMS for instance) and 
presentation (the UI front-end) has always been quite messy to 
maintain (well, on the projects have been involved in, at 
least) especially for data intensive application (the user is
having a lot to input) :
This goal would be to maintain on the client the XML data and 
always automatically bind it with the forms used for the data
input. No need for an extra layer of binding, the data in
XML leaving the client browser is ready to be inserted in the
backend database for instance.

For this, I've been exploring two things so far:

  - XML on the client with an HTML page containing DSO data
    bindings of the HTML tags to the related XML elements.
    It works fine for prototyping but I'm having a concerned 
    for the maintainability and the fact that the DSO is a
    Microsoft thing maybe not to be expected as a standard 
    (anything like this in Mozilla too?)

  - A generic HTML page, and two data islands, one pointing
    to the XML data, one to an XSL sheet in charge of 
    building the HTML forms dynamically on the client. Every
    time a field is modified, an onblur event is triggered, 
    the XML is updated and the XSL stylesheet is applied 
    again, regenerating the updated HTML front-end. It is 
    interesting except for such basic UI things such as the 
    focus on the next UI element which is lost, etc...
    XSL was sounding promising but maybe not now for such a 
    purpose...

It is very difficult to find pointers on information going 
into this direction so far. Has anybody the same kind of 
interest, and would be interested in starting a discussion
group on this matter? Any feedback on the idea above? Anybody
working on such a way of building data intensive client UI and
applications exchanging data between a client user and a server?

Thanks,

Olivier.


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