* On Christopher's site, as far as I know, XML pages are sent as such to
the client (your computer), along with an XSLT file telling your browser
how to translate XML into HTML. It's thus up to your browser to do the
job, and some browsers do it well, some others poorly, some others by no
means. It depends, actually, on the presence of an XSLT interpreter
coupled with your browser (e.g. MSXML with IE6). Opera, for instance, is
not able to transform XML into HTML, as it lacks an XSLT interpreter.
IE6 does it well, but IE5 didn't. (Please, Christopher, do not hesitate
to amend what I wrote above should I be wrong.)
* On TanakhML site, XML pages are dynamically generated by Apache server
side on page request and sent to another server, Tomcat, where they are
treated online by Cocoon (see http://www.apache.org/ for more
onformation about Cocoon) who interpretes XSLT files to transform XML
pages into classic HTML ones. HTML files created by Cocoon on server
side are then sent to the client (your computer). Your browser is thus
in no case responsible for doing the job. What your browser reads when
accessing a page from TanakhML is, actually, pure HTML! XML is only
used there as an internal format, on server side, the "lingua franca" of
the web remaining HTML.
There are, however, two other, quite distinct problems:
1 - The capability of browsers to correclty understand UNICODE (vs.
ASCII). Some browsers do the job great (e.g. IE6, Opera), and some other
not that good (e.g. Mozilla and Firefox always display hebrew points a
little bit too left from the place they should be in).
2 - The capability of browsers to fully understand CSS. Some browsers
(e.g. IE6), for instance, correclty understand "text-align: justify"
and "text-align-last: right" clauses, while some others do not (e.g.
Mozilla, Firefox, Opera).
We are thus faced to at least three distinct groups of problems:
- XML vs. HTML: does your browser understand XSLT?
- UNICODE vs. ASCII: does your browser correctly process UNICODE?
- CSS vs. HTML-coded style: does your browser understand CSS (normally,
yes), and which level of CSS (1, 2 or 3)?