RE: The Cathedral and the Bizarre (was: do you use pi's?)

Subject: RE: The Cathedral and the Bizarre (was: do you use pi's?)
From: Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 10:55:54 +0100
Hi Martin.

Thanks for the update of progress.

On the issue of attracting the development community to Mozilla, it would
appear to me that Mozillazine.org is doing it's utmost to drive away all
but the Mozilla zealot. Their obsession with anti MS rhetoric makes me
start to gag everytime I go back there for updates. I tried politely
bringing this up with the Webmaster but was "firmly" told that MS was as
good as the devil incarnate.

This is unfortunate as for anyone wishing to track Mozilla development day
to day Mozillazine.org I find is a better place that Mozilla.org which
tends to be overly terse for casual updates.

As for XStyles.... I'm torn on this one.

I can see what's being done with this, and it looks exciting (I'd certainly
liek to have a play with this), but isn't this just a repeat of the mistake
made with JavaScript Stylesheets (JSS)?

I had an interesting chat with two Netscape developers regarding XUL, with
a few E-mails bouncing back and forth, until I brought up MS HTC... I never
got a reply nor heard from them again.

[In comparisson to this during the beta I was contacted by a MS rep
specifically to quiz me about areas of IE5 that caused difficulty, or that
where lacking... inviting not repeling critique]

It would seem to me that if Mozilla wants to play in this area, that an
implimentation of HTCs would serve the development community better, which
already exist now as an independant W3C Note..... Having said that, I
confess to a heavy bias in this, and if I'd been plating with XStyles first
I'd probably be advocating that.

It also seems to me that is the .selectNodes(...) MS XML DOM extension was
implimented by Mozilla, then the very diret equivelant of what presented
bellow could be implimented wholly from within script.

I should probably shut-up on this however until I get a closer look at
XStyles. If you have any initial documentation of XStyles, I'd love to have
a look at it, as it occurs to me it might prove useful in some work I'm
facing.... I have to find a way of implimenting XLink interpretation on the
server-side (ASP), converting XLink representations into something
functional for delivery to the client-side. I was planing on implimenting a
JavaScript class as a client-side linkManager, and delivering XLink
interpretations as a JavaScript triggering anchor, with an instance of the
class.... messy.

All this was going to be implimented through a WSC (Windows Scripting
Component... MS are really jumping all over this concept... like a HTC on
steroids registerable as a COM class) on the server.

Even if XStyles are a while off I'd appreciate a gander at some examples to
at least grok the concept being played with.

There are too many holes in the tapestry being woven that is XML at
present, and we need all the tools we can get to patch it.

OK, I confess ::blush:: that was a blatant attempt to get another quote up
on Cafe con Leche... I feel dirty now.

Cheers
     Guy.





xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 04/07/99 07:59:40 PM

To:   xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc:    (bcc: Guy Murphy/UK/MAID)
Subject:  RE: The Cathedral and the Bizarre (was: do you use pi's?)




Hi Guy,
[SNIP]
Exiting mechanisms, What now needed is that the development community
become
aware of these good things.
[SNIP]
But stay tuned, we'll have something new very soon. A procedural event base
script language named XScripts. You'll be able to transform a SGML/XML
document into whatever you want (not restricted to XML). Here is a sample
<XStyles>
<element match="/">
  output"<HTML>"
  process-children()
  output"</HTML>"
</element>
<element match="MyMarkup">
  output "<BODY>"
  output "<P> This text includes" & (Sheet * 2) & "pages<P>"
  output value-of_select("subMarkup")
</element>
</XStyles>
[SNIP]




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