305121 - Support document.XMLDocument

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 153281

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

For a DOM document transformed by a XSLT stylesheet, Microsoft supports:

document.XMLDocument - the original, pre-transformation document
document.XSLDocument - the XSL document. 

Axel says supporting .XSLDocument is probably difficult but XMLDocument is
probably not. See:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/properties/xmldocument.asp

for more information. This would be useful for when sites supply XSLT
stylesheets for XML data files so that they render properly in less capable UAs,
but where one particular Gecko UA has capabilities to do something special with
that document type.

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht]

About document.XSLDocument, transformiix doesn't use a DOM for the stylesheet at
all, so exposing that doesn't really make sense, we had to construct it in 
addition, and on transformation, reparse it. Ugly.
Looking at the AJAX sample on
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/properties/xsldocument.asp,
though, we may want to expose the XSLTProcessor instead.

How about document.XSLTProcessor? It's not 100% nice, as we have a DOM class for
that already, but that is on window. Exposing that would enable AJAXes to 
setParameter and retransform parts and all that.

Note that, AFAICT, IE doesn't do anything tricky wrt automatic retransforms, 
which is a good thing.

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I'm not sure I'm following the use case here.  When we say "one particular Gecko
UA" do we mean "as opposed to non-Gecko UAs" or "as opposed to other Gecko UAs"?
 If the latter, what's the deal?

Comment 3

[Axel Hecht]

The triggering usecase is feedview.
The UI for live bookmarks would like to get to the original document, independent
of wether it was styled by a stylesheet PI or pretty printer or feedview and check
wether it should display the yellow icon to add a live bookmark.

There are a bunch of AJAX usecases in general, though, and inquiries for such a 
feature have come up every now and then ever since we support XSLT. We just
didn't bother to implement it yet. As we do have a case we need now, it's better
to do something close to what IE does, though we will not be compatible on the
stylesheet side of things.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Ah, ok.  So this is for purposes of doing something other than just rendering
the original document.  That works.

Comment 5

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

Tell me this isn't a dupe of bug 153281.  :)

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Looks like a dup to me....

Comment 7

[Alex Vincent [:WeirdAl]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 153281 ***