Dan,
I believe that MSXSL (the Microsoft XSLT processor) got a reputation for implementing the standard poorly when Microsoft jumped the gun and included it in Internet Explorer 5 before the standard was final. W3C made significant changes in the standard after that, leaving many IE5 users high and dry. I don't use MSXSL myself, but my understanding is that more recent versions are standards compliant, and it may even be one of the better XSLT processors.
MSXSL does have extensions, which you need to avoid if you want a script to be portable; but then so do the Apache and Saxon processors. Everyone is supposed to use a different namespace for their extensions (Microsoft's is msxsl:), and that makes them easy to identify. But the presence of extensions does not make the processor non-standard, as long as they are implemented in the right way.
Peter
Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
Does anybody have experience using the recent releases of MSXML? I'm wondering in particular if their xslt is standards compliant. I understand from the XML bible http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/chapters/ch17.html that it is or was not. Microsoft's own pages make it sound like the latest versions might be http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xmlsdk/html/xmmscXMLOverview.asp, but it can be difficult to trust them sometimes.
I ask because a neat tool (Textpipe http://www.crystalsoftware.com.au/textpipe.html) I use has now built-in XSLT, but depends on MSXML.
For those who don't know what I am talking about: XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language-Tranformations) is a stylesheet language used (amongst other things) for converting documents written in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) such as used by the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) into HTML for display on the web.
Once the web site is up, we should put all these acronyms into a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file. Does anybody know of a good existing list of acronyms for beginners?
-dan