Re: Links in DocBook XML

Steven T. Hatton wrote:

> I have been carrying on a discussion with some folks on the DocBook
> mailing list regarding the use of XML and CSS, without any XSLT
> transformation to XHTML.  

Basically, don't waste your time.  Do it all server side and send
your users HTML.  No browsers implement all of CSS2 yet, and none 
of them implement all of XML yet either, so for the moment it's all
in pieces all over the floor, and will break for anything other than
a trivial document.

I'm uncertain why this is. Browser-side realtime parsing and styling
of SGML was possible nearly a decade ago, at acceptable speeds on the
slow lines we had then, using a lightning-fast 120MHz PC running W95,
Netscape, and a copy of Panorama. This retrieved full DTDs and style
sheets, with full entity resolution, and performed a tokenized parse
omitting only some aspects of validation -- more than adequate for the
job. It implemented bidirectional and multi-headed HyTime links, and 
a load of other stuff that browsers have been promising for years. 

Quite how Netscape, Mozilla, IE, Opera, and the rest have dropped the
ball so badly is not clear, but it is utterly inexcusable that ten
years after the technology was in daily production use as a plugin,
we still don't have anything even remotely near it in a production
browser (with the exception of DocZilla, of course, which is based
on the same technology [Synex] used in Panorama).

///Peter
-- 
XML FAQ: http://xml.silmaril.ie/