David, Jarno, Elliotte
Thank you all for your answers.
Elliotte Harold wrote:
1 Why does XSLT 1.0 have relatively poor string handling
capabilities?
Because XSLT is designed to process documents in which significant
boundaries are indicated by XML markup, not non-XML text.
I'll buy this answer. I suppose it's fair to say that the internal
non-markup content of an element is none of XLST's business.
But, in the real world, dates are in YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS format, not
<year>YYYY</year><month>mm</month>... and there are many XML schemas where
there is significant structure within the content of elements and attributes
(SVG for example).
If we don't have general purpose string handling functions then we must at
least have functions that can operate on known data-types (date, list, etc).
But these are also missing in XSLT 1.0.
2 When attempting to view an XML document that contains an invalid
character (for the encoding) in IE it complains that the
XML document
is invalid and displays nothing. However in Firefox the
document is
rendered but the character is shown as a black diamond containing a
question mark. Shouldn't Firefox reject the document?
At least that part of the document that follows the invalid character.
That's what I thought - Firefox is taking a liberty by recovering and
parsing the rest of the document - too bad if it's in some script or
something where you don't get to spot it. But, I'm sure IE will embrace and
extend when folk complain that their stuff works better in Firefox than in
IE ;(
David Carlisle wrote:
3 Where's the documentation for the Transformiix XSLT
engine that's
embedded in Firefox?
"Use the source, Luke..."
there's a bit of top level documentation on the mozilla site.
What extensions are supported?
none
:(
Is it scriptable, etc?
yes see above
:)
Most links seem to point to the Netscape DevEdge
odd, where were you looking?
Well this page http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xslt/ has a link to DevEdge,
but it also has a link to
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xslt/js-interface.html which I somehow
missed.
Thank you, all.
Regards
George
George James Software
www.georgejames.com
An InterSystems Technology Partner
-----Original Message-----
From: David Carlisle [mailto:davidc(_at_)nag(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk]
Sent: 13 December 2004 13:50
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Subject: Re: [xsl] Understanding XSLT Questions
1 Why does XSLT 1.0 have relatively poor string handling
capabilities?
It's a bit of an open question:-)
but a couple of reasonable guesses.
a) It's version 1 of a language: more features can be added
later (XSLT 2
has more string handling)
b) In general XSLT 1 isn't designed to be optimal for "Up Translation"
ie going from less structure to more structure. It's primary design
goal was (explictly) "down translation" where you are
styling highly
structured XML down to XSL FO (or HTML or text or whatever). If all
your structure is marked up in your XML source you don't need
extensive string handling. Of course XSLT go used for far
more things
than its original designers might have imagined...
2 When attempting to view an XML document that contains an invalid
character (for the encoding) in IE it complains that the
XML document is
invalid and displays nothing. However in Firefox the
document is rendered
but the character is shown as a black diamond containing a
question mark.
Shouldn't Firefox reject the document?
yes (harsh but true) well actually that "yes" has to be
slightly conditional. The XML spec says that is a fatal
error, so the xml parser is not supposed to make any
automatic correction it has to stop and report an error. But
a web browser is far more than an xml parser, if that decides
to trap the error, fix the input by putting a bad character
marker there and then restarting the XML parse, that is
probbaly out of scope for any spec to outlaw.
3 Where's the documentation for the Transformiix XSLT
engine that's
embedded in Firefox?
"Use the source, Luke..."
there's a bit of top level documentation on the mozilla site.
What extensions are supported?
none
Is it scriptable, etc?
yes see above
google
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=transformiix+xslt+script&meta=
would have lead you fairly quuickly to the interface
description to javascript
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xslt/js-interface.html
Most links seem to point to the Netscape DevEdge
odd, where were you looking?
google is your friend...
David
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