Ahhh – there is of cause the Microsoft (proprietary) solution

As mentioned
yeasterday I have been reinventing the wheel and (re)writing XPath 2.0 functions as named XSLT templates since the MSXML 3 in Internet Explorer 6 isn’t XPath 2.0 compliant. As always there is however a Microsoft proprietary solution using the urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt namespace. This namespace adds support for a number of utility functions as mentioned in the “Microsoft XPath Extension Functions“-article over at Microsoft Developer Network.

You have to be running MSXML 4 for this namespace to work however which means that even the proprietary solution isn’t workable for me since MSXML 3 is the default for Internet Explorer 6.

While researching this subject I found that MSXML 3 (or 4) isn’t the newest version. There is a MSXML 5 (only used with Office 2003) and a MSXML 6 (supplied with Visual Studio 2005). Even the newest MSXML 6 doesn’t however support XPath 2.0. The supported API’s in MSXML 6 is:

  • XML 1.0 (DOM & SAX2 APIs)
  • XML Schema (XSD) 1.0
  • XPath 1.0
  • XSLT 1.0

Come on already – please implement the standards!

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!

Need XSLT support in Callisto?

For some reason I fail to understand the recently released collection of plugins from the Eclipse Foundation (also referred to as Callisto) doesn’t include support for XSLT even though it has editors for XML, DTD’s and XML Schema (XSD). Support to XSLT is however very easy to add since you can use the EclipseXSLT plugin.

Installing is as easy as creating a new remote update site under “HelpSoftware UpdatesFind and Install” and installing it from there. The address to the update site is http://eclipsexslt.sourceforge.net/update-site. Took me 5 minutes or so. Easy. It does however require that you already installed the XML part of the Callisto release.

Calendar interoperability

While listening to Inside the Net episode 29 podcast I learned of calconnect.org which is “The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium” (Quote: “The Consortium is focused on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies. The Consortium’s mission is to promote general understanding of and provide mechanisms to allow interoperable calendaring and scheduling methodologies, tools and applications to enter the mainstream of computing.”)

In the podcast Scott Mace is interviewed and mentions calconnect.org where they recently got seven calendar systems to talk to each other. Interesting Lotus Notes/Domino and Microsoft Outlook/Exchange is included in the test using CalDAV.

This is very interesting. Would this be too late to fully incorporate and support CalDAV in Hannover/Domino Next?

I’m back…

Well – I’m back from my cycling (holiday-)trip to the Dolomite mountain range in Italy. 688 km and 17.280 meters climbed on 6 stages going between all the famous ski resorts there (Canazei, Cortina, Val Gardena etc.). Work will actually feel like holiday now… 🙂

Going on vacation!

I probably wont be blogging at all over the next week as I’m leaving for the Dolomiti mountain range in Italy to ride my bike. 6 stages with a total of 604 km and 16710 height meters incl. many well known Giro d’Italia stages. If you care you can see the passes I’ll be riding here (in Danish). I’ll be posting pictures regulary at my personal blog (also in Danish).

Profile for stage 2: