MS and XSL (was XML and IE5 beta PR2)

[Simon North]

[Jon Bosak:]

> It's my impression that Microsoft sees XSL simply as a way to do tag
> transformation and that their strategy for XML display is to use XSL
> to transform XML tags to HTML tags.  This means, of course, that you
> will not be able to use Microsoft tools that support XSL to do any
> formatting more complex than what can be expressed using HTML+CSS.

That is more or less the impression that I took away from my 
visit to Redmond for the XML Summit in July, with a few 
qualifications. 

As I understood it, Microsoft are committed to using XML as an 
intermediate format ("islands of data"). DHTML is the display tag 
language of choice. XSL is only of interest in so far as it can be 
used to transform XML into DHTML, but XSL is not necessarily the 
language of choice because (and this is borne out by the fact the IE5 
appears to be fully DOM compliant) the DOM gives as much, if not more 
accessibility. 

It was my understanding that MS were heavily committed to CSS, but 
they intend to extend  it to support 'CSS behaviors', which 
allows executable code to be attached to elements via style sheets. 
This would promote re-usable code, would ease the 'coder 
bottleneck' that currently seems to threaten web page production 
efforts, and would introduce a form of 'no-install' software (a 
contender for Java applets?). 

Simon North. 

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