How I hate reinventing the wheel

I’m doing quite a lot of work at the moment defining XML document “languages” and associated XML schemas (why I’m happy for the great XML and XML Schema (XSD) support in Callisto) at the moment. In that connection I’m also doing XSLT stylesheets for end-user presentation in Internet Explorer (version 6 or higher). We have to make Internet Explorer a requirement for user-presentation since Firefox doesn’t support resolving entity references when using XSLT which we need for content reuse.

Once this was settled it was all well and good until I yesterday discovered that Internet Explorer 6 (and hence MSXML 3.0) doesn’t support XPath 2.0 which means that all the nifty XSLT functions defined in XPath 2.0 such as the date/time functions cannot be used. Bummer!

So here I am back at reinventing the wheel rewriting all the date/time functions as named templates using the substring XPath 1.0 substring function. Even more bummer!

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lekkim

Positive, competent, out-spoken, frank and customer focused architect and developer with a strong foundation in web, cloud and product development. I'm a strong advocate for API first and cloud based solutions and development. I have a knack for being able to communicate and present technically complicated matters in conference, customer and training settings. I've previously acted as team member and leader in a product organisation.