Viewing It With IE5 and Mozilla, Take 4 (XSL)

In this section, we'll see a very different rendering from our same XML input document when we apply an XSL stylesheet in IE5. This example is not yet supported in Mozilla betas, but we'll see an interesting Mozilla example with sorting and style.

We saw in the previous section that it was trivial to reference an XSL stylesheet from an XML document. Although we are not covering the syntax of the actual XSL document in this article, we've provided some XSL that works with IE5 in the table below. The most confusing thing is that (at the time of this writing) IE5 supports only the Dec. 1998 XSL Working Draft, and even that draft isn't completely supported. This means that the syntax is different for: (1) referencing the XSL namespace and (2) many of the XSL elements from which you can choose.

To refer to the XSL namespace in IE5, use the old URL reference to the spec:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl">

However, note that with other tools (such as the much more up-to-date XT discussed in the next section), the namespace line is different and uses a URI, rather than a URL (in other words, it does not need to map to an actual file):

<xsl:stylesheet 
	xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/XSL/Transform/1.0">

Internet Explorer 5	Public (non-beta) release March 18, 1999. Supports XML, XSL (Dec. 1998 Working Draft with exceptions and extensions), CSS1, HTML4, VML, DHTML, MathML, and a variation of DOM.
www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ (Windows) www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/default.asp (Unix)	Windows and Unix only.
Examples/IE5-XS-1.gif Examples/IE5-XS-2.gif (this link will appear in another window)	Screenshots of WDVL XML example with XSL stylesheet as it appears in IE5. Note that additional content (labels) is generated, and a table is generated for CDs but not for Books.
Examples/collection1-xsl-style.xml (this link will appear in another window)	XML document with XSL stylesheet referenced.
Examples/collection2.xsl (this link will appear in another window)	XSL stylesheet referenced by above XML document.
Netscape Mozilla Milestone 7	Beta release from June 22, 1999 of what will become Netscape Communicator 5. Supports XML, CSS1, HTML4, DHTML, and DOM. Some support for CSS2 and DOM2.
www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/release-notes/	Windows and Unix; Mac most features.
Examples/Mozilla5-sort1.gif (this link will appear in another window)	Screenshot of Mozilla XML/XSL example showing sorting, style 1.
Examples/Mozilla5-sort2.gif (this link will appear in another window)	Screenshot of Mozilla XML/XSL example showing sorting, style 2.

The Netscape portion of the above table illustrates their use of XSL for transforming data (in this case, both sorting and styling) into different formats and orders.

Adding a Bunch of Style: XSL Advantages
Doing It With XML, Part 2
To XT or Not To XT