RE: Background on DSSSL

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


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