Re: Dynamic conversion from XML to HTML & WML

[Matt Sergeant <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Daniel Hinz wrote:

> Vinay Jaiswal wrote:
> >  I have written stylesheets for creating WML & HTML files statically from XML using XT. WML files
> >  can be directly displayed by microbrowser (Nokia Wap Toolkit) and HTML files can be
> >  displayed by any browser. Now, I am working on dynamic conversion of HTML and WML from
> >  XML depending upon the browser. I need to host only one XML page on server and it can be
> >  browsed by any browser or microbrowser.
> > 
> >  I would like to know how you are doing and welcome your suggestions in this regard.
> 
> Evaluate the Browsername in the HTTP Request. Use the appropriate
> Stylesheet for the given Browser and you're fine.
> 
> Note, that in this way you can also optimize content presentation for
> all the different WAP phones out there by using different Stylesheets
> for different phones.
> 
> The usal way to go is one Stylesheet per phone. It's even worse than one
> Stylesheet for Netscape and Internet Explorer when using XHTML.

Ugh - we had a brief talk about this at XMLDevCon2k in the XML.com
discussion forum. Getting into the "one stylesheet per phone" is a
horrible world of pain, there are already about 25 (probably lots more
now) WAP browsers out there. We need to force the W3C to take WAP into
consideration for standardisation, or the cost of WAP development is going
to be astronomical, and we're not learning from mistakes of the past.

And don't use one stylesheet for netscape, and one for IE, please. Its
really not necessary. It takes a little longer to get things right, and it
does require some compromise on features (although in reality, very little
compromise), but its a definite win to only develop one stylesheet. Even
JS can be done using a cross browser JS library.

-- 
<Matt/>

Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
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