Venting

Subject: Venting
From: Scott Ferguson <ferg@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 06 Feb 1999 16:42:53 +0000
>
> Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 17:46:08 +0000
> From: Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Venting
>
> Some vendors may want an XTL, a generic transformation language, without
> formatting. If so *go make one*, please don't hijack XSL as a style
> language.

It would be better in your mind to have 20 proprietary XTL's, just so XSL isn't sullied?

> We have vendors on the list comming forward saying that because they only
> impliment the transformation they can't declare 100% XSL compliance (an
> impossibility at this stage anyway), so please hack off the formatting. I
> must be missing something here, as I respect the intelligence of the people
> gathered on this list.... but I can't see why. The purpose of XSL isn't to
> produce a generic transformative language, but a styling language. If good
> transformation is a side-effect all the better.

Here's why.  In the real world, people use obsolete browsers.  Even when the browser
implementers finally implement the formatting portion (and see how long CSS1 and 2 have
taken), it will take another 2-3 years for people to switch to the new browsers.  Sites
today still need to support the 3.0 browsers, you can't just assume everyone's upgraded to
4.5.

So for the next 4 years, web site designers will have to create HTML.  XTL can help them do
that today.  Today, not 4 years from now.

Also, many of the web site designers are already overwhelmed with all the new technology
they need to learn: CSS, JSP, JavaScript, XTL, etc. along with trying to make their design
company profitable.  From my company's perspective, we can give them XTL today to help
generate their HTML (okay, in a month or two) and they only need to learn one new thing.
If we insist that they throw out their HTML and CSS experience and learn all of XSL, we
will lose all interest in our product.  Yes, that's a marketing issue, not a technical
one.  But if you really don't care about marketing at all, why not just use DSSSL?

Scott Ferguson
Caucho Technology
http://www.caucho.com



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