[xopus] [RT] Do we really need XSLT?

[Roger Fischer]

Hi Ugo

As Lon is on our list and Christian and me are on Xopus list, my suggestion
is to continue this RT thread on both lists.
I hope we can have a good and fair discussion.
Best
Roger

Where RT is for "Random Thoughts" ;-)
I was wondering today why does Xopus require an XSLT transformation to
transform the XML source to HTML. Given that Xopus is targetting
browsers that directly support the display of XML styled with CSS
(Mozilla and IE 5+), do we really need HTML? If we avoided XSLT, maybe
- we'd work around bugs and limitations in the browsers' XSLT processors
(there seem to be quite a few in Mozilla that are causing troubles to
Xopus developers).
- editing would be more consistent, not having to guess which XML
element is going to be modified when the caret is on a HTML element.
- applications could be developed faster: developers would not have to
learn XSLT.
- maybe performance would be better.
Of course, there's the problem that Xopus' aim is to make it easy to
edit *HTML* pages, so the editable elements are usually embedded in HTML
and not in XML pages, but I think IE has support for "XML islands", so
maybe they might be useful. Don't know about Mozilla, though. We could
post an RFE to Bugzilla if we needed this feature.
Having said that, let me say that I really like and dig XSLT, but maybe
in this case it is causing us more problems than it solves.
Now fire at will,
Ugo
--
Ugo Cei - http://www.beblogging.com/blog/