Re: XML based web site sample

Suzanne Topping wrote:
> 
> For those of you who are interested (like Erik), I've found an example of an
> XML-based web site (which in fact is a description of XML-based web sites.)
> 
> http://www.xml.com/1999/03/ie5/first-x.xml

The "ie5" in the URL is a useful clue, because the page does in fact rely
on certain features of that browser. Looking at the source, I see:

<article xmlns="http://www.xml.com/namespaces/first-x"
         xmlns:html="any-old-bollocks" >

For interoperability, a more reasonable namespace declaration would be

<article xmlns="http://www.xml.com/namespaces/first-x"
         xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >

However, the html namespace seems mainly to be being used to do
hyperlinking. Using xlink would be a better way to go.

Apart from this, which means that hyperlinks do not work, and apart from
some less than fully specified stylesheets which make the preformatted
examples all exist on one line, this is a reasonable example and displays
adequately well in Opera4,  rather less well Mozilla M13 and IE5/Win, which
seem to have some difficulty with the floats.

The stylesheet doesn't bother to declare that for example list elements
should be displayed as lists, so both Opera and Mozilla do exactly as asked
and don't display them as lists. If the stylesheet is altered to ask for
those elements to be displayed as lists, Opera and Mozilla do as asked and
IE5 ignores the request.

The stylesheet also attempts to match on qualified names, which is wrong.
(look for the selector html\:a)

Modulo these caveats, that page is a reasonable example, if a little old.

--
Chris

Received on Monday, 14 February 2000 07:58:13 UTC