I agree that CSS is pretty cute when used correctly, but the browser incompatibilities you mention are not so prominent anymore when old browsers are taken out of the mix.
I'm not surprised IE Mac doesn't handle CSS very well as MS stopped developing it years ago, at version 5.0 (allthough I think another unofficial version 5.5 shipped with OS 10). I think around the time they bought their share in Apple and was forced to agree that it was too much work to try to compete with Safari.
CSS support for IE on win32 is decent, but lagging in implementing new CSS2 properties (such as the blogger favourite max-width for those dynmically sizing columns). Opera (which is Håkon Wium Lies employer) and Mozilla are getting there (CSS2 compliancy), but still have some work to do.
It's not really fair to compare XSL and CSS as their intended areas of use a different, but with some overlap and lots of scope for misuse: CSS is a declarative language for defining layout and cosmetics while XSL is for structurally changing a parsable X(HT)ML document.
So what Håkon is ranting on about is really that CSS is better for styling documents for various platforms (e.g. handhelds, printers etc.), than XSL. But I would argue that it would be misuse of XSL to do that in the first place.
I ONLY use XSL for transforming one flavour of XML into another (for instance if two systems communicate using XML and have different schemas). Using XSL to transform XML into a viewable (or printable) document on the client-side (in the browser) is rubbish anyway IMHO
XSL tranformation is best done on the web-server as there is no guaranteed way of doing this in a safe, cross-browser way (the ONLY way in IE is using MSXML ActiveX control!)
There is space for both technologies IMO
It will be interesting to see what will happen to IEs faltering market share as Firefox and others gain even more of an edge when it comes to implementing new, cool CSS standards that IE doesnt have (and we dont expect a new major-version of IE until the release of Longhorn IIRC).
As web devlopers start using these new features, many sites are going to render a lot better in non-MS browsers, which is a bit of a reversal from a few years ago, no? This is allready happening to a large extent(and not all developers code for graceful degradation, so more and more sites are going to become unusable with IE)...
I dont think they will.. Microsoft now see browsers as a commodity product, and they realize their efforts are better spent in areas with a higher potential return.
Opera will feel more threatened by this, but they have the devices market to concentrate on which will become much more important for them...
The time for making money off selling browsers is finished a long time ago (sorry Opera, you'll have get your revenues from mobiles and PDAs)
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I agree that CSS is pretty cute when used correctly, but the browser incompatibilities you mention are not so prominent anymore when old browsers are taken out of the mix.
I'm not surprised IE Mac doesn't handle CSS very well as MS stopped developing it years ago, at version 5.0 (allthough I think another unofficial version 5.5 shipped with OS 10). I think around the time they bought their share in Apple and was forced to agree that it was too much work to try to compete with Safari.
CSS support for IE on win32 is decent, but lagging in implementing new CSS2 properties (such as the blogger favourite max-width for those dynmically sizing columns). Opera (which is Håkon Wium Lies employer) and Mozilla are getting there (CSS2 compliancy), but still have some work to do.
It's not really fair to compare XSL and CSS as their intended areas of use a different, but with some overlap and lots of scope for misuse: CSS is a declarative language for defining layout and cosmetics while XSL is for structurally changing a parsable X(HT)ML document. So what Håkon is ranting on about is really that CSS is better for styling documents for various platforms (e.g. handhelds, printers etc.), than XSL. But I would argue that it would be misuse of XSL to do that in the first place.
I ONLY use XSL for transforming one flavour of XML into another (for instance if two systems communicate using XML and have different schemas). Using XSL to transform XML into a viewable (or printable) document on the client-side (in the browser) is rubbish anyway IMHO
XSL tranformation is best done on the web-server as there is no guaranteed way of doing this in a safe, cross-browser way (the ONLY way in IE is using MSXML ActiveX control!)
There is space for both technologies IMO
It will be interesting to see what will happen to IEs faltering market share as Firefox and others gain even more of an edge when it comes to implementing new, cool CSS standards that IE doesnt have (and we dont expect a new major-version of IE until the release of Longhorn IIRC).
As web devlopers start using these new features, many sites are going to render a lot better in non-MS browsers, which is a bit of a reversal from a few years ago, no? This is allready happening to a large extent(and not all developers code for graceful degradation, so more and more sites are going to become unusable with IE)...
"In China, the radiation effect is always positive, leading to bigger and better vegetables that will revolutionise agriculture."
I dont think they will.. Microsoft now see browsers as a commodity product, and they realize their efforts are better spent in areas with a higher potential return.
Opera will feel more threatened by this, but they have the devices market to concentrate on which will become much more important for them...
The time for making money off selling browsers is finished a long time ago (sorry Opera, you'll have get your revenues from mobiles and PDAs)