Re: Someone bashing XSL

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

From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
> I did get an assurance that those pages would be withdrawn and
> rewritten, are they still there?

and

At 12:05 PM 7/31/99 +0800, James Tauber wrote:
>> Well, I'd say that it's the guys at Decisionsoft doing the bashing,
>> and maybe it's a bit unfair of them to quote Michael Leventhal that way.
>
>Right. As far as we can tell, Michael has no connection with Decisionsoft.
>
>Michael's quote aside, I actually object to Decisionsoft's misrepresentation
>of XSL on that page (http://www.xmlscript.org/xsl.html) (and of DSSSL).
>
>Oh well :-)

I hate to continue this mire, but really have to wonder what you're all so
upset about.  The white paper isn't spectacular, nor is the page, but I
sincerely hope the folks at xmlscript.org didn't knuckle under to a group
of screaming XSL partisans.  Their XML-based scripting language takes a
very different approach from that of XSL, and highlighting the differences
seems reasonable.

While they may _no longer_ be correct that XSL is limited to
presentation-oriented transformations, this was certainly its history and
original purpose, and has certainly colored its development.

Basically, instead of griping about a competitor's whitepaper, I'd really
like to see some of you write your own whitepapers, treating xmlscript as a
competitor rather than some kind of impudent pretender.  If XSL really is
that much better, I'm sure it can put up with the mosquito bites of 'mere'
competition from outside the W3C.

And maybe some competition, taken seriously, could improve XSL...

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com


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