Subject: RE: Rant : "Microsoft is compliant with the XSL spec" From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 15:37:57 +0100 |
Actually, in many respects it has been because MS was early with XML (not late) that there have been problems. They have come out with tools and implementations _ahead_ of the specs, seen fit (for whatever reasons) to extend the draft specs in their own directions, and used the labels of the W3C specs being worked on (e.g. "XSL") as if their stuff was conformant. The company suffers from putting some very smart people right out front, and yet being slow in other ways to respond or adapt -- and not always very clear or forthright about what it is doing. Admittedly this must be difficult for a company of its size. I say nothing about motives or mindset, and agree that this list shouldn't degenerate into an MS-bashing forum. Despite one or two small if notable slips, MS developers are apparently making genuine efforts to be good citizens, and Jonathan Marsh in particular has been able to step in very helpfully at times. Nonetheless, the health of XSL as an enabling, cross-platform standard is a concern to all of us, and a great deal of bandwidth is still being devoted repetitively explaining to newbies how we are unable to help them ("but this is the _XSL_ list, isn't it?"), and that what they are doing is out of spec despite what they might have thought or heard. Any efforts we can make to address this problem proactively, as a community, will have the double benefit of helping the newcomers and reducing the frequency with which we are called on, once again, to try to explain this mess nicely to one more eager but bewildered neophyte. Publicly-available treatments of the conformance problem (web pages we can all point to, FAQ entries etc.) all fall into this category. (FWIW, the list owner and I have discussed some of this off line, though like all the rest of you, it has to be said we're already swamped.) That's what we should do. What MS should do, beyond what its XSL team is already doing, would surely include: * removing or revising all the outdated, and now misleading, material from their web site that refers to "XSL" without explaining the whole story; and * NOT sending out uninformed marketing/training hacks (however well meaning) like the instructor described in Warren Hedley's original post in this thread, who misstate and misrepresent the conformance issues. Both of these sources of disinformation that are still polluting the XSL waters, eventually causing their victims, and the community as a whole, time and money spent in cleanup. (A third is the coverage of "XSL" in books in the bookstores -- what do we do about them?) In the long run, it has to be seen as a very poor marketing strategy to push stuff this way: the days of vendor lock-in are gone, and may never return. But ultimately we should keep in mind that developers and their companies have to be responsible for themselves. The lesson should be, don't take Microsoft (or any!) marketing at face value, or you may get what you deserve. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance," etc. Both sides are right on this one. Respectfully, Wendell Piez >... My own feeling is that although >Microsoft were a little late into XML, the speed at which they are pushing >things is scary and the implementation of the spec issue, which appears to >effect pretty much all major software vendors to some extent or another, >will soon be behind us. ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ====================================================================== XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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