Hey,
I'm about to start developing a web app and require the use of XSLT to transform DITA files to HTML.
Is the XSLT specification adhered to with all browsers, or there any quirks (much like the HTML spec in IE)? If so, does anyone have any information regarding the "quirks"?
Thanks, Simon
I don't believe you'll have any issue with the XSLT. However, you will have the standard issues with the web content generated by the XSLT.
Why wouldn't you do this conversion on the server side, where you have tighter control of the XSLT parser? Why leave anything to chance? Personally, when I've done XML/XSLT -> HTML presentation conversion, I've always done it on the server. YMMV. I guess there's something to be said for offloading conversion to the client, but I've always worried about the very thing you are, compliance.
That said, most browsers you'll encounter today (safari, webkit, gecko, IE) will have decent XSLT support. Just like HTML it'll have it's quirks, however. IIRC with XSLT, like XHTML, your HTML needs to be well-formed. No
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I know you asked this a while ago, but I don't think you can just use XSLT to convert DITA to HTML. Perhaps it'd work in extremely simple, non-linking topics, but for the full spec you need something like the DITA Open Toolkit to do preprocessing and aggregation of titles/links for maps, etc.