fractalnavel

resolved the following issues from earlier, one way or another:

• a number of my .xsl's use msxml extensions

  "solution": use the element-available() function and just strategically ignore the ie specific processing.  i'm not entirely happy with this, but it's the only reasonable option until xslt 2.0 gets implemented.  i did manage to change a couple of minor items to use only core xpath functions (notably, the apod display).

• ie can allow cross-domain access, but ff cannot

  i did create the proxy i mentioned, and it was as simple as i thought.  i added 15 minute caching while i was at it.  one snag: the proxy piece is accessed in a sub-application from community server's perspective, when used in my weblog.  had to add

  <location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false"> 
  ...
  </location>
  

  around the main system.web section in community server's web.config to prevent undesired inheritance in the sub-app.

• handling of xml data islands in ff

  ff has a problem properly constructing the dom when empty nodes are present.  adding   fixes these sorts of things.  this affects a lot of stuff in ff, especially when dealing with css.

  anyway, doing this turns out to make the processing easier than in ie, since i only had to get the childNodes property.  of course, walking the nodes in ff meeans checking for and excluding text etc. *sigh*

one remaining annoying issue is that mozilla xsl handling does not support the disable-output-escaping attribute.  so yes, you're seeing markup.  ff also does some strange things when accessing rss files directly.  it has special processing in place that is not overrideable, and it implements this with a series of extensions in javascript.

yeah, ok, these open source folks are pissing me off.  they are as bad or worse than ms when it comes to doing - or not doing - shit, according to their whims.  and usually, it results in crippled-ness, whereas when ms decides not to abide by standards, it's usually in the cause of usability.  those people blindly praising ff etc. don't have a clue.

another issue: i render those feeds with a "refresh" link that's supposed to just reload & display the feed its assocaited with.  for some reason, in ff it's reloading the enitre page.  whatever.

still to-do:  all the sub-pages of the site.

an oh yeah: for some reason, just as i was getting to the end of all this, ff started to regularly lock up on me.  even after a reboot, same problem.  not sure what introduced this issue, since really nothing more was happening, at least not in "kind", but only in "number".  so, let me know if it happens to you ;-)  i suspect i ran into yet another mozilla limit.

side note: saw that the server event log had twice-daily issues with a particular feed using an old approach that someone was still accessing (craig, i think - ?), so i just made it server.transfer to the new one. someone is going to start getting new items after - months ?  years ?  ;-)