Re: Venting

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 05:57 PM 2/4/99 +0700, James Clark wrote:
>So why hasn't it been split?  People need to understand that the W3C
>working groups don't just work on whatever they feel like.  W3C working
>groups have a charter that says what they are allowed to work on.  The
>charter has to be formally approved by the W3C director and member
>companies.  The XSL WG's charter authorises it to work on a stylesheet
>language not a transformation language.  From the perspective of the
>charter, the only justification of the transformation part of XSL is
>that, when combined with the formatting object vocabulary, it yields a
>stylesheet language.  The XSL WG is producing a spec defining a
>stylesheet language, because it's chartered to define a stylesheet
>language.  However much I sympathize with your desire to see the
>transformation language separated out, it's hard to make a case for this
>within the XSL WG given the current XSL charter.

It may not be simple, but it's been done before, with XLink and XPointer.
The combined specs were a mess.  Splitting them simplified things
immensely, and made it possible to implement them separately - as XLink and
XPointer, not as 1/2 of the XLink/XPointer spec.  (Of course, we're still
waiting...)

I don't know what kind of W3C rigamorole they had to go through to get
there, but it may be time to find out.  If the W3C is that inflexible
internally, that's another problem to solve.

Split this beast.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (March)
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com


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