RE: [xsl] browsers with XSL capabilities

Subject: RE: [xsl] browsers with XSL capabilities
From: "Evan Lenz" <elenz@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 16:54:19 -0800
Robert Koberg wrote:
> There are some really cool things you can do with IE5.5 - it is a great
> browser! Editable DIVs and SPANs, etc, control over right click (context
> sensitive) menus and so much more.

I agree. The contentEditable attribute is quite powerful.

> It would seem that if a good (javascript) developer could come up
> with a way
> to "roundtrip" (back to XML) these editable DIVs and SPANs you
> could have a
> really cool browser based XML editing system... :)

That would be cool. Until then, you can do server-side XML construction
based on what the user submits and still get many of the same benefits. If
you allow them to edit full HTML, which is certainly supported, but only
scoped to a certain part of the page, then you could store that HTML as text
content (rather than markup, because its not well-formed) within XML. This
goes against the basic idea of the separation of presentation and content,
but not if you consider user-customized presentation as part of the content.
For example, you could allow them to edit full WYSIWYG HTML but only scoped
to a certain element on the page. The "real" presentation (generated from
XSLT on either the server or the client), including things like navbars and
footers, is read-only with respect to what the user is able to edit.

Unfortunately, since the HTML produced by the browser-based editing is not
well-formed, you can't do much with that content when you want to display
the edited page again unless you use XSLT's disable-output-escaping. Tough
luck if you try this with Cocoon. MSXML3 handles it fine though.

For a small demo, I've put up a temporary page on my website, so you can get
an idea of what I'm talking about. The server would take the posted data (in
this case only one field containing HTML-encoded text) and include/replace
it in the XML source file. The demo requires IE 5.5 but not MSXML.

http://xmlportfolio.com/temp/contentEditable.html

This is a remnant from a past prototype project, so please excuse the messy
source code.

Evan Lenz
XYZFind Corp.


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