RE: Background on DSSSL

[Tony Graham <tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 23 Jun 1999 15:54 -0400, Mason, James David (MXM)  wrote:
 > Could DSSSL survive without ISO/IEC approval? I don't see why not. Other
 > things (e.g., PERL) exist on community support without the intervention of
 > the formal standards process.

Yes, but Perl, Tcl, Linux, Apache, Emacs, and all the other
community-supported applications each have a single point of
authority.  (Okay, some of them might have more than one, e.g. Emacs
and XEmacs, or Debian, Red Hat, etc. for Linux distributions, but
you get the idea.)

Contrast the strength of those efforts, with their various cathedral
or bazaar development models, with the commercial Unix world, where
every vendor developed a slightly different version so that it
requires serious autoconf magic before a program, including any of
the listed applications, compiles on multiple platforms.

The authority for DSSSL is the ISO standard and/or Jade's
implementation of parts of the standard.  Jade's non-standard
extensions have become a de-facto standard because the majority of
DSSSL users use Jade and so have the extensions available to them.

I like the idea of DSSSL as an ISO/IEC standard, not least because it
makes a solid point of reference.  However, whether it remains an ISO
standard or not, everybody needs to keep speaking the same DSSSL
dialect (or limited number of dialects) so that our DSSSL programs
remain interoperable.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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