KDE

I've been working with DocBook XML content a lot lately and found it quite inconvenient that I had to transform it to HTML before being able to view it. As furthermore Konqueror (resp. KHTML) is still lacking support for embedded XSLT stylesheets, I started to poke at it. As a preliminary result I present you an XSLT plugin for Konqueror.

The mechanism is actually quite (mostly) simple:

• Check if the current document either has an <?xml-stylesheet?> directive or is of known type (currently only DocBook 5.0)
• Load the respective styles (and try to avoid Xml eXternal Entity vulnerabilities)
  
• Pipe the document through libxml and libxslt with libexslt (unfortunately QtXmlPatterns doesn't support everything needed by DB yet)
• Push the resulting file back into the KHTMLPart

Examples

This is what http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/Overview.xml looks like with XSLT enabled (using the given <?xml-stylesheet?>):

Todo 

Unfortunately this is still just a prototype. It has several unresolved issues and is possibly INSECURE:

• Konqueror may crash on closing (it sometimes does for me)
• Level of integration is pretty low. You still see the raw XML content before it switches to the transformed HTML. I still have to figure out if this is suitable as a plugin, if I should create some XML KPart or if this should be integrated into KHTML
  
• No XInclude support
• Support for more XML schemata
  
• Possibly vulnerable to XXE (XML eXternal Entity) attacks which basically means a remote XSL could import a file on your harddrive