[prog] XSL-FO Browser Implementations

[Anthony Gorecki]

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Hello,

I've recently been pouring over various W3C recommendations and working
drafts, specifically relating to XSL-T 2.0 and XSL-FO 1.0, searching for the
best presentation solution for an upcoming website. For anyone who can offer 
an opinion or suggestion on the display process and compatibility problems 
described below, comments are welcome and would be appreciated:

1) The website's content will be generated through the use of PHP and various
third-party extensions, to suit the user's page request.

2) The resulting data will be output to the user's browser application in the
form of XML, with an XML instruction to include an XSL stylesheet that will
contain the website's basic template and content-specific subtemplates.

3) The XSL templates will transform the XML source tree as required, and will
format the result tree to match the website's overall style and layout.


Ideally, I would entirely skip the XHTML and CSS formatting semantics and rely
soley on XSL's formatting objects, however neither Internet Explorer nor the 
Mozilla family of browsers have a working implementation of XSL-FO. A 
transformation on the XML result tree to convert the content into another 
language, such as XHTML, would allow the browser to display the page for the 
user, but this is undesirable -- it also doesn't appear to be avoidable. 

The above compatiblity issue is my primary source of frustration, is there a 
way to bypass this problem which I haven't been able to find?

While the content management system will allow both server-side and
client-side XML/XSL operations, it will operate in client-side mode by
default, as part of the overall design of the application. 

I've also noticed that the Mozilla Foundation doesn't currently have a project
under development to implement the XSL-FO specification. Is there anyone here 
who would be interested in migrating their web-applications (development 
versions) to XML and XSL semantics, if there were a working implementation of 
XSL, beyond the current XSL-T support offered by present-day browsers?


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Best Regards,

Anthony Gorecki
Ectro-Linux Foundation
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