Browsers and source files

Hello,

Persuant to issue #138, in private conversation, Michael wondered what
we would find if we did a survey of browsers. Given that I have VMs
lying around, …

On Windows (Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, which is really Chrome anyway
these days), Linux (Firefox and Chrome) and the Mac (Firefox, Chrome,
and Safari):

* Clicking on “ixml.ixml” downloads it.
* Clicking on “ixml.xml” displays it in the browser’s default XML view

On an iPad

* Clicking on “ixml.ixml” downloads it.
* Clicking on “ixml.xml” displays the text nodes from the grammar.

I don’t have only a very old Android device and it doesn’t seem to work
anymore, so I can’t guess what a modern Android device does.

I haven’t tried the proposal that Michael made, adding an explicit XML
stylesheet PI to the grammar, but I have mocked up a couple of web
pages.

  https://ndw.github.io/ixml/ixml-ixml.html

and

  https://ndw.github.io/ixml/ixml-xml.html

I think this would be a better solution *even* for the browsers that
currently do more-or-less a reasonable thing. I especially like the fact
that I can see the whole ixml grammar without downloading it and we can
add a “copy” button to the page.

If there was general agreement that this was a good idea, I’d be happy
to invest a little effort to make the XML view dynamic like the default
view in most browsers. I might even be persuaded to try to make the ixml
version pretty-printed. And we could generate these pages automatically,
of course.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh
Saxonica