Re: Venting

[Robin Cover <robin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Guy Murphy wrote:

> OK lets sacrafice XSL on the alter of marketing spin so you
> can describe your product as 100% XSL compliant.

I don't think this is fundamentally a question of 'marketing
spin' -- even if there is a marketing concern down the road.

A tangential concern:

The surest way to create genuine confusion is to give something
important "the wrong name."  You probably can't give your
child "the wrong name" but you can give a language
"the wrong name."

Whether "XSL" is "the wrong name" and whether the XSL
specification should be split are debatable.

However, I am personally sympathetic to the position that
"XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) may now subsume too
much territory -- including definition of facilities that
are not easily explained as "stylesheet".  Granting the
difficulty of political processes which may lie in the
path to a "correction," I think it would be unwise to
underestimate the long-term negative impact of naming
a language poorly.  If distinct (sub-) languages are
what we really have (throw in what should be one or
more 'query languages'), then I think the W3C should be
urged to design names that are well-matched to the
scope and fundamental features of these languages.

My .005 cents.

-rcc



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