Subject: Re: Netscape Support for XSL - client vs server rant From: Keith Visco <kvisco@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 15:04:05 -0700 |
I apologize for the slight off topic response...I'm starting to get a little impatient with people who "blame" others who are donating their free time (nights, weekends, whatever) to deliver a free product... Heather Lindsay wrote: > The only ones you > can blame are microsoft and mazilla for not being able to keep up with > technology that changes every day (are we asking for too much?). I couldn't really believe my eyes when I saw this posting. It's called Mozilla not "mazilla", and feel free to blame _me_, because I am (with the help of some good contributors) the one donating my free time (eg. I don't get paid by anyone) to develop the XSLT processor that will be used in Mozilla. There are a lot of fine people donating their free time to make a product they believe in, and you want to blame them for not keeping up with technology. As far as "keeping up with technology" ... I wrote my first XSL processor (in Java) back in 1998 when XSL was only a "W3C proposal". Basically it was a rewrite of Shawn Russell's Docproc, for those of you familiar with that tool. Interestingly enough, Microsoft, a company you are criticizing for not keeping up with technology, was the lead company on the initial XSL proposal. Over a period of a couple years the W3C released numerous working drafts and eventually split off the transformations piece of XSL into XSLT. I always did my best spending my free time to upgrade my XSLT processor to keep up with the latest spec. Not being a W3C member, or part of the Working Group, I always had to play catch up when new drafts came out, as I had no clue what the changes would be. I think I've done a great job "keeping up with technology". In anycase, when I heard a little over a year ago that Mozilla didn't have an XSLT effort underway, I decided I would port my Java XSLT processor to C++ and give it to them. Working on my Java based XSL processor at home didn't leave me any free time to work on the C++ version, so luckily, I was working for a good company (MITRE) which allowed me to actually start the project on company time (so yes, I got paid for some of my initial time on the project) and they never got a dime for their donations to the project. Having to follow Mozilla's guidelines for portable C++, the porting turned out to be a difficult task. I couldn't use the STL which is poorly supported, and was left with no real library of base classes I could rely on. Since the java version relied on the nice feature rich library of standard Java classes, I was left to code much of this from scratch. I also wasn't allowed to use exceptions. I've spent a large amount of my time working on this, so the Mozilla community will have XSLT support. There are good people, most of whom, I've never met, helping to do the Mozilla integration....so here's the scenario...a very small number of people working for free on a product that will be used by a very large number of people. These people (the developers) won't get paid, they won't get any fame, and they will get very little recognition. So why do they do it? Because they believe in the technology, and like you they need products that support that technology. So you asked, "Are you asking too much"? Unless you want to pay these developers...then yes, you are asking too much. If you don't like the way things are going, why don't you donate your time and help the effort? And more importantly, think twice before you criticize the efforts of others, especially when you have the opportunity to help, just as they are, to build these tools you complain so much about. --Keith XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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