At 06:13 AM 2/4/2003, Mike Kay wrote:
And we wouldn't be doing schema support in XSLT
unless there were major vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM who
claim that their users are clamouring for it.
That makes a lot of sense; and it's interesting to contemplate in view of
the evident fact that while these major vendors (hi guys!) are very
*active* in the industry -- in the sense of implementing, developing,
listening to users (naturally, to *their* clients and users, as we little
guys listen to ours), dealing with a set of real problems, reading this
list -- we scarcely if ever hear from them in public. The clamoring to
which Mike refers is reported only in the committees. (Apparently not even
Mike has heard much of it first-hand.) The reasons for this must be
complex, even unfathomable, though I can readily imagine that if I were in
the same shoes as the engineers and managers at the big vendors, working
within the same set of constraints, I'd be doing the same. They are, after
all, working for their employers and their clients and customers, as I am
working for mine. So, okay.
But why push standards development so hard in the direction of their users,
when the community at large (which includes many who develop for projects
and organizations that don't have the deep pockets of -- or the same set of
problems as -- the big guys' clients) is so consistent, indeed amazingly
unanimous, in our reluctance to see these particular mechanisms wired into
the specifications?
Has the pendulum against proprietary technologies swung so far that even an
IBM or Microsoft can't say "try this: it's an XSLT processor, with
extensions -- well documented, clearly marked with a namespace -- that
support matching by schema-derived datatype", or whatever, etc.? Float them
in the marketplace first?
If the market decides that it wants XSLT processors with schema support
then it will indeed get frustrated with products that don't offer it,
and vendors of those products will come under pressure to provide it.
If, as many people on this list are predicting, users don't care a damn
about having schema support, then they are unlikely to miss it. The
market will decide.
Inevitably. So why wire these things into the standard before giving the
market any chance to do anything at all?
If W3C ends up killing "XML for the little guy", the big guys will
ultimately lose out too. Big, complex specifications -- however much their
complexities are "necessary" in the view of one use case or another -- will
just make for more fragmentation, stratification, confusion, and a wider
culture gap between the haves and (the various varieties of) have-nots.
It's already happening.
But Cassandra has said all this before....
Cheers,
Wendell
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