At 00:57 19/04/2003 -0400, you wrote:
This is cool, but what about people who want to support browsers other
than X-Smiles?
Simon,
My strategy for a new technology tends to be to focus my time on one
implementation - hopefully the fullest implementation - and get a
progressively better feel for what it will do and what it won't.
Like Saxon 7.x and XSLT 2.0, X-Smiles seems to be the quickest to implement
new features after a new WD comes out. Miko Honkalla of X-Smiles is on the
XForms WG.
There are about a dozen implementations listed on the W3C site. There was
an implementers' meeting about a month ago. There are said to be about 24
implementations (presumably of various states of readiness), but the last
time I looked the W3C page hadn't been updated to reflect these additional
implementations.
X-Smiles also allows playing with XSL-FO which may be of interest to some
on this list. Some of the XForms examples on X-Smiles use XSL-FO and XForms.
Is there a public XSLT library out there to convert XForms to HTML?
Not that I am aware of. But see below.
When I analysed the situation about 6 months ago it seemed like XForms was
a waste of time until there's an implementation in a regular browser. And
even then, the functionality can be reproduced (it seems to me) without
needing XForms, thus, the browser support will probably lag behind
genuinely novel things like SVG support. So, I decided to go with regular
HTML forms.
I don't necessarily share the assumption that everything has to happen in
the regular browser. But that, almost certainly, is off topic and could be
a long discussion.
IBM alphaworks released a few days ago an implementation for normal
browsers - more specifically it was designed to display in IE 5.5+ with
MSXML 4 Sp1. Which I had but the supplied examples didn't work without
scripting errors. IBM's response was that my errors were due to not having
MSXML 4 Sp1, which I could see the correct DLLs were there and the
Properties indicated they were the correct version.
So, if the IBM implentation will work for you (which it didn't for me) you
might like to explore it.
Andrew Watt
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list