Hi there,
At 07:06 AM 28/06/2004, you wrote:
I've been following this discussion on browser standards with interest, but one thought keeps nagging at me.
One of the mentioned benefits is this browser or that browser's XSLT parser and its standards compliance. I think that we all agree the standard compliance and also the promotion of open standards are good things. The little nagging thought comes with this discussion of XML transformation in the browser. Who actually requires this of their users?
We have a number of sites created over the past few years that require client-side XSLT processing, because our main UVic Web servers have no XSLT processor. In fact, they have only one CGI program (FormMail), disallow installation of your own PERL scripts, and are only now experimenting with adding PHP.
Many users have extremely out of date browsers which will display HTML with (sometimes if you are lucky) a bit of CSS.
I think "many" is really overstating the case there. Our current crop of software produces output which only works on browsers released in the last three years; we sell steadily to customers all over the world, and the only complaints we've had about browser compatibility in the last six months have come from one US corporation and one US military unit, both of whom said they were not allowed to upgrade from IE5.5 to IE6 by their sysops. The rest of the world is happily moving forward, and with such a wealth of reasonably good browsers available, there's no reason to stick with an old browser (or at least, there's no reason to stick with ONLY an old browser, and avoid adding a new one to your system). The current Firefox download is less than 5 megs, and it runs happily on a Pentium 166 from 1996. Users who avoid updating IE are being a bit silly, because they're leaving open security holes. The only real problem platform is the remaining installed base of Mac OS 9 and below, for which there isn't really a good modern browserand this shrinks monthly and is pretty insignificant outside North America; even there, I think recent versions of Netscape will work.
Many don't have browsers that have XSLT parsers built in. So it really isn't an issue, to me, because any site I design will always try to serve (X)HTML as a bare minimum.[1] The transformations of XML to HTML via XSLT may be done on the fly, but they certainly won't be done in the user's browser. I don't trust users to have any particular browser.
I don't either, but it's reasonable to ask them to have one of several good standards-compliant browsers if you're doing something complex that needs modern features. And I also think that encouraging people to go and get good browsers, by providing them with an incentive in the form of a site that makes good use of modern standards, is an all-around Good Thing.
Cheers, Martin
______________________________________ Martin Holmes University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre mholmes@uvic.ca martin@mholmes.com mholmes@halfbakedsoftware.com http://www.mholmes.com http://web.uvic.ca/hcmc/ http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com