Why is the XSLT disable-output-escaping not implemented in Firefox?

Question

This is an issue that recently came up for me while writing a new XSLT for some XML generated by an application with XTHML embedded using CDATA. Normally I've been able to use disable-escape-output to render the results correctly.

However, in Firefox, everything was being displayed as escaped (i.e. &) as opposed to rendering as expected, since Firefox tends to be my primary browser when developing this resulted me losing some time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong before finding Firefox Bug 98168 describing the issue.

Right now it looks like this issue is not slated to be implemented in Firefox and I've been reading through the bug's comments and it looks like the decision was made back in 2001. As such, I was hoping someone might be able to explain what the issue is and if it still applies now in 2009? Also, if this is never going to be fixed in Firefox, is there a workaround for it besides using another browser?

Answer 1

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98168#c99 and subsequent comments describe the current status of the bug: "disable-output-escaping" can be implemented in Firefox, but it requires a different approach when processing the stylesheet than the one used by Firefox's XSLT processor (serialize+parse instead of creating a DOM tree while processing the stylesheet). Patches are accepted, but it seems that no-one plans to spend time on fixing the issue.

Even if it's implemented, such stylesheets will require more CPU resources to be processed, and Mozilla developers say that usually there's a better solution than using d-o-e. If you want help in your specific case, you should describe it in more detail (although I probably won't be able to help).