Re[9]: WG: [xslt] decimal char problem - possible Solution - my conclusion from Discussion

[Marco Stipek <stipek triplex de>]

Hello Daniel,

Friday, September 14, 2001, 1:54:42 PM, you wrote:

DV>   Hum, except for a trial to reverse-engineer what got supported
DV> by common browsers, I don't really see a clear rule associated to this
DV> (allow only entities if their character is <= 255 ? that would not
DV>  make much sense nor cover the laquo and raquo cases ...).
The only way covering browser specific behaviour will be the
introduction of a "special" output format, but I think this will be
the worst scenario for a standard based parser to support such
completely standard killers.

As I emphasised in my last postings we should support as far as
possible the standard allows. Breaking standards will support the
miss behaviour of the browser producers and this is something we
shouldn't support!

The decimal charref is allowed by standards, so we can use it. We
don't introduce miss behaviour regarding standards, we only use a
different way allowed by the standard.

If there will be more cases of unconformity to standards, maybe an
feature patch "output htmlcompat" could be supported. I think things getting better.
After discontinuation of support of Browsers prior to Version 4. But
NS 3 at the Moment is totally unusable for internationalisation.


DV>   I don't see any "right" way to handle this in general,
I agree. But some points I think will be more clear now:

- Supporting changes which support more Browsers and raise the
  usability for different scenarios is a good point, because the
  acceptance of XML/XSL will increase.
- This must not lead to incompatibility issues with standards, because
  they are another point of acceptance
- As far the implementation could be changed in a way the standards
  allows it should be done if other applications could deal with the
  output more correctly.
- If there is any need for standard breaking code, it should be
  treated in a different way, as Daniel proposed to create a new
  encoding type "htmlcompat" which 'supports' missbehaviour. Maybe
  this should only be added as a patchable feature.

I think this is my conclusion from these big discussion about Browser
behaviour, standard conformance and implementation.

Thank you for your patience and help!

regards,
Marco
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Marco Stipek

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