Peter Flynn <peter.nosp@m...> writes:

> I gave up trying to use XML in browsers a long time ago. The browser
> makers are not willing to support XML, so I do it all server-side.

Hmm.  

Oddly enough, I discovered a couple of years ago that one can
in fact now use XML in browsers on the Web.  I had always used XML
in browsers on my local machine, but in fact nowadays IE and Firefox
and other Mozilla-based browsers and Safari and Opera all do 
support XML in the sense that they can read it, parse it, and
transform it using XSLT.  Sure, there are irritating gaps in 
the XSLT support (not everyone supports unparsed-entity-uri()
and Firefox pretends the tree has no namespace nodes) -- but
then, there are irritating gaps in browser support for pretty
much everything they claim to support, aren't there?

One friend has said "but you just use XSLT to translate it into
HTML -- that's not really serving XML, is it?  You should be using
CSS to render the XML directly", but I think I disagree; HTML is
perfectly serviceable as a rendering language for screens, and
using XSLT means I can generate tables of contents and do text
mirroring for things like cross references.  And it's been a long
time since I generated a static HTML document in order to make
a working paper I wrote available to people I was working with --
so it's been a long time since we had problems owing to someone
else reading an out-of-date snapshot instead of the current
XML form of the document.

Experience shows that publishing XML on the Web is pretty much
just as helpful and convenient now as we expected it to be, back
then.

I think, Peter, you might want to look again; the situation may
be rather different from the one you despaired of a long time
ago.  

-- 
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies
http://www.blackmesatech.com/