Re: [xsl] :o) (Re: qualitative decline of xsl-list questions)

["Kurt Cagle" <cagle@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dimitre,

I wrote a paper a few years back about the evolution of technologically
oriented communities, in which I outlined the fact that such communities
usually go through four phases -- core standard articulators, core
implementers, adapters (i.e., developers), and generalists. XSLT has now
been in existence for six years, formally, which means that it is now being
used by people who have absolutely no clue what they're working with, have
no real grounding in the technology or its imperatives, and are looking for
turnkey solutions from vendors.

I actually got a bit of that mindset from Microsoft, of all places. I went
in for an interview for a position writing demonstration code (I was bored
that day, and it sounded like it was an interesting way to see what they
were doing in that particular area of technology) . The technology in
question involved using XML for describing a presentation layer (any more
description and I'd have to kill me), and I outlined a lot of what I'd been
doing in the XSLT space. His dismissive comment rather floored me:

"Oh, you must be one of the five people on the planet who know how to work
with XSL."

It was at that point that I realized that even if I shone through the rest
of the interview the chances of me getting that job were zero.

There are many, many people out there who have absolutely no desire to want
to learn XSLT, or even investigate whether it may be useful, because
companies like Microsoft continue to denigrate it in favor of their own
technologies. This will become even more true with languages such as VB.NET
and C#, which replace the relatively straightforward DOM model with a
framework class that I truly find byzantine.  In order to set XSLT
parameters, you have to instantiate a secondary XPathNavigator object to
retrieve an object that lets you assign parameters, that then needs to be
passed as an argument into the Transformer object -- it's understandable
from a class perspective, but is so friggin complex that you REALLY need to
understand what you're doing just to do what should be a simple action (and
IS in the corresponding Transformer class in Java). This is a case of
designing interfaces that the few people who ARE dealing with the technology
at Microsoft can use them, but for which the average developer will be too
complex to want to learn.

-- Kurt




----- Original Message -----
From: "Dimitre Novatchev" <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 11:18 AM
Subject: [xsl] :o) (Re: qualitative decline of xsl-list questions)


> As seen in microsoft.public.xml ... :o)
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>
> From:       RD
> Date:       Friday, 6 December 2002 6:44 PM
> Newsgroups: microsoft.public.xml
> Subject:    Fed up with MSXML
>
>
> This hole XML DOM s**t is overly complex.
> It has tens and tens of methods and properties. and what
> are all these interfaces and objects for?
> this sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks
> sucks sucks sucks.
>
> And yes, I know what i'm talking about. I have spent the
> last month developping an application using VBScript and
> MSXML. And I now believe VBScript + MSXML is the most
> s**tty compination you can get.
>
> I ended up working directly on the text stream by using
> regular expressions (wich happen to lack some features in
> VBScript, like lookbehinds) instead of parsing it.
>
> Here are some example
>
> <one>
>   hello
>     <two>
>       blahblah
>     </two>
>   world
> </one>
>
> i could not manage to extract "hello world". I kept
> getting "hello blahblah world" (using oXmlNode.text).
>
> <text> the quick red (1) fox jumped</text>
> I want to replace (1) by <ref id="1">. Haven't found a
> reasonably simple way to perform this with the DOM, and
> used regular expressions on the text file instead.
>
> And all this XPath babble about axes and functions and ...
> is this the Microsoft documentation or is this thing as
> complex as it seams?
>
> This is pure masoshism in my opinion. XML should be
> simple. Next time I write my own parser.
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
> http://mailplus.yahoo.com
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
>
>


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list