Comments on: Browser Detection with XSLT

By: MSt

MSt — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:41:03 +0000

I’ve updated the demo to run with IE 7 too and at the same time moved to XHTML 1.1. Do you see any other problems?
@davidlantner
Can you give more details? As far as I can see, the page is served as “application/xml” because IE does _not_ allow “application/xhtml+xml”
@zachleat
_my_ website has about 24.000 pages, don’t know if it qualifies as “major”.

By: TNO

TNO — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:08:18 +0000

@davidlantner
Probably because IE and older Opera puke on that mimetype

By: davidlantner

davidlantner — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:38:42 +0000

By the way, note that Manfred is serving the page as “text/xml”, which is deprecated, whereas the Diablo3 site is served as “application/xhtml+xml”.

By: oopstudios

oopstudios — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:11:36 +0000

Brilliant! Now to do it in javascript instead…

By: TNO

TNO — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:13:32 +0000

don’t you mean @zachleat?

By: dr01d

dr01d — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:43:50 +0000

@TNO:

Diablo 3 site is using XML + XSLT and it is pretty slick.

Another thing thats pretty interesting is that you can do the transformation serverside with Apache if you compile modxslt2 found here: http://www.mod-xslt2.com/

By: TNO

TNO — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:34:55 +0000

@jaysmith:
In IE6+ you can rely on XPath/XSL 1.0 support, but not much more than that. you have to get creative if things get complex. (But hey, at least its Turing Complete). Plus I’m pretty sure IE6 supports import and include. Now, whether its bugged or not is another question…

By: jaysmith

jaysmith — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:44:39 +0000

WOW (and i dont mean world of warcraft). The xslt trick above demonstrates a hidden temple. I’ve written alot of xslt but never in the client because of cloudy browser support.

I did’nt know ie6 could run this. Amazing. So the only thing not really working in clientside xslt would be the importance of “import” and “include”?

By: zachleat

zachleat — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:17:16 +0000

Does anyone know of any major websites using XSLT clientside besides the World or Warcraft one?

By: TNO

TNO — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:11:41 +0000

@jaysmith:
As you probably already know, XSL + XML can be used as a client side markup preprocessor (I can create a webpage with a single tag called and transform it into a full blown table of all the months or whatever at runtime across my pages). Part of the standard XSL library includes a function to determine what type of engine is transforming the syntax. Using this you can determine before render time what browser is viewing the page and adjust accordingly.

By: jaysmith

jaysmith — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:22:40 +0000

Could someone explain what this really is? How and what could we use this for?

By: TNO

TNO — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:48:44 +0000

I’ve used this property quite a few times over the years but its only practical if people use XML + XSL to generate their web pages, and in my experience less than a handful bother. Whether its a lack of understanding or a lack of opportunity I don’t know.

By: OndraM

OndraM — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:53:10 +0000

Works great in FF and IE6, but I get an Invalid Request error in IE7 (7.0.5730.13)