More Tests Up On Web Site "Chinese XML Now!


Date:     Tue, 15 Dec 1998 00:15:02 +1100
From:     Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>
To:       xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Subject:  More tests up on Web site "Chinese XML Now!"

Just to say I have put up more XML test files on

     http://www.ascc.net/xml/test/index.htm.

Now we have:

for a total of 396 different tests.

The test files are not designed to all be viewable with IE 5.0 or Gecko/Mozilla. But it is interesting to see what their level of support is.

IE 5.0 beta is quite happy with the +CSS files, and (apparantly this depends on what other things you have loaded, I cannot figure it out) will on some systems display XML with a nice default stylesheet. (However, IE 5 beta seems to have position-dependent encoding PIs and stylesheet PI, so I removed "standalone" from the former and "charset" from the latter.)

For the Big5 and GB2312 encodings, IE 5beta is great. (Of course, you need the Asian handling installed, but it is just a download away. ) IE 5 does the correct thing if it cannot understand an encoding: it refuses the file. Gecko, for example, does not seem to use ISO 10646 at all: it looks like its stuck in 8859-1: the current version doesnt seem to even look. Nasty.

But there are lots of strange things: when we put a string that looks like a numeric character reference inside a plain file http://www.ascc.net/xml/test/wf/big5/application_xml/zh-big5-7.xml it is OK. But the same file using a stylesheet interprets the CDATA string as if it were an NCR: http://www.ascc.net/xml/test/wfss/big5/application_xml/zh-big5-7.xml

Rather unexpected behaviour. It is interesting that IE5 beta treats an incoming XML file the same whether it is plain/text, text/xml or application/xml, when you are browsing it. It is very determined to interpret the file as XML if it has an XML encoding PI. Gecko seems to use the MIME registry much more: I think I prefer that.

The other thing to keep in mind if you are using any of the test files with Chinese characters (many dont) is that if the font that your browser is using a font without those characters you may see just a white box or something.

Rick Jelliffe , ricko@gate.sinica.edu.tw.


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