One of the problems with sharing XID cards — on a web site, for example — is that users may navigate to the URL and see XML. That could lead to some confusion. Safari users would have it even worse; they would see an unformatted page that only displays XML node values (IE & FF both parse the XML and show it in a tree view).

Luckily, there is a perfectly acceptable solution: XSL. Using XSL, the card can now display as if it was formatted HTML for browsers (IE 6+, FF1+, Mozilla, Netscape 8+, Opera 9+, AND Safari). The same page will still look like raw XML for applications wishing to pull data from the same URL. Additionally, the formatted page presented to users can provide instructions for how to use the XID card.

Check out this example XID card: http://xidcard.com/brianshaler
(Note: the formatted page will probably get a redesign prior to launch)

If you view the source of that page, you will see the same old XML as before, but the first line now references an XSL document for formatting:
<?xml-stylesheet type=”text/xsl” href=”http://xidcard.com/display.xsl”?>

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 2:02 pm and is filed under New Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.