Re: Accessing the original XML DOM after browser-applied XSL transformation?

blblack wrote:
> I'm just now getting ramped up on XML + XSLT stuff with the intent of
> possibly using it in a new corporate web app, having come from
> previously doing just (X)HTML+CSS, so bear with me.
> 
> The new app's web interface is being designed around the XMLHttpRequest
> concept - load the user interface page once when you log in, and then
> stay there and dynamically load new content as they click around the
> page type of thing.  (Yeah I know there's a buzzword for it, but I'm
> trying to avoid it :) ).
> 
> In any case, what I'd *really* like to be able to do is:
> 
> 1) Send the initial page as a pure XML document of my own structure,
> with an associated static XSL containing a bunch of nested transforms
> which transform it into XHTML 1.1 at the browser.
> 
> 2) Have the javascript xmlhttprequest-based interaction code in this
> page pull fresh XML data from my server based on the same DTD/namespace
> as the original page I sent.
> 
> 3) Use DOM or something similar to insert/append/replace chunks of the
> original XML document with the new content.
> 
> 4) The new content should be correctly transformed to XHTML in the
> browser just as if it were part of the original document.
> 
> When I got to step 3 is of course where the plan failed.
> window.document refers to the resulting XHTML from after the XSL
> transformation.  "View Source" shows my original XML, but the DOM
> Inspector (and as near as I can tell, anything I can see from
> javascript-land) only shows the transformed XHTML document.
> 
> Is it just plain impossible?  Or am I missing some interface/object
> that I failed to find, which would allow me to manipulate the
> pre-transform XML?  And if there is, will the existing transformation
> to XHTML automatically stay in sync with the XML tree changes?
> 
> The only thing I saw that might be close would be to manually load the
> xsl a second time from inside javascript and do the transform manually,
> but that would also mean that I'd have to manually maintain references
> between the XML and HTML trees to know where to map the output to, and
> it would screw up XSL transforms that depended on the context of
> elements which are not part of the fresh fragment being
> loaded/transformed.
> 

Does IE expose the source XML to js in the result doc somehow? If so, is 
that documented anywhere?

Axel