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July 3, 2005

July 3 2005

AJAXSLT

Google’s recent release of AJAXSLT is a good first step towards unifying XSLT services in the browser. Currently, IE uses a rental-model XSLT processor, which is inconvenient for stateful Javascript applications like direc.tor because you have to instantiate a new object every time you make any change to the XSL stylesheet. Hopefully the browser vendors will converge towards a common interface, like they did with XmlHTTP, in the future.

Even though the AJAXSLT library supports Safari and Opera, it’s still not ready for prime time, mostly because of performance reasons. In IE and Firefox, the AJAXSLT library is really just a pass-though for the compiled XSL services. However, in Safari and Opera the XSL transformations are done in interpreted Javascript, making it much slower than IE and Firefox. Many people have asked me if I could use this library to make direc.tor work with Safari. The answer is yes, but for anyone with more than a couple hundred bookmarks, the poor performance would become unbearable very quickly.



6 Comments »

  1. ha, I just left a comment on the other post about this. I guess that answers my question.

    Comment by Tom — July 3, 2005 @ 6:43 pm

  2. Del.icio.us Enthusiasm

    Trackback by Rick.Stavanja.com — August 9, 2005 @ 1:46 am

  3. To stick up for IE for a change… is there any reason why the other browsers couldn’t just support W3C XSLT (it’s not like it’s new).

    If performance is poor, doesn’t matter how great the technology is, people won’t use it.

    Comment by Steven Livingstone — August 29, 2005 @ 10:55 am

  4. Hello I comes from Austria and by coincidence into the Blog came, you writes here over a Intressantes topic at opportunity would like I with it to enter more in greater detail and express, but to me still different Blogs regard to I defenitiv commit myself. Until soon and kind regards from the alpine country Manuel.

    Comment by Manuel — March 8, 2006 @ 6:40 pm

  5. I think the difference between IE and Opera and Safari is too large. So it will take a lot of time, before all browser have the same performance with the XSL transformation…

    Comment by berker — May 15, 2006 @ 3:40 am

  6. I think the difference between IE and Opera and Safari is too large. So it will take a lot of time, before all browser have the same performance with the XSL transformation…

    Comment by Tessa — October 19, 2006 @ 4:21 am

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