Subject: RE: Background on DSSSL From: "Frank A. Christoph" <christo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 07:46:47 +0900 |
> 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. Then again, if there's only one implementation, who needs a standard? --FC DSSSList info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist
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