Re: [xsl] the future of xslt

["James Fuller" <james.fuller.2007@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 10:21 PM, Dimitre Novatchev
<dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I am not sure these statistics are useful at all.

I agree that presenting anything as 'statistics' is potentially
problematic, but these trends must be indicative of 'something' or
plain wrong.

> I have my own indicators. One is that this mailing list became visibly
> less interesting the moment Jeni Tennison ceased her active
> participation.

come again ? does this indicate more or less interest in XSLT or
indicative of your interest in this particular posting ;)

> Yet another indicator is the statement of Phill Wadler at the 2002
> Oxford Summer School of Functional Programming that "XSLT is the most
> popular functional programming language".

5 years ago, we had a lot less adoption of XSLT also depending on your
definition of a fp lang ... scheme does better (I would have thought
haskell would do better as well, though its probablly mispelled quite
a bit)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=xslt%2C+haskell%2C+lisp%2C+scheme&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

> I also know a number of significant Web and content publishing
> applications used on a daily basis and providing contents to millions
> of viewers, that are very fundamentally XSLT-based. Probably the
> people engaged with these are happy enough (do not have signifi
> problems or are not at all aware of the XSLT nature of the services
> they are consuming) so that they do not generate the noise that would
> put XSLT ahead in the cited statistics.

yes and I have written a few of those in xslt ... I am questioning
google trends thought on the matter rather then try and say 'xslt is
not experiencing adoption'.

> Let's try to formulate and answer another question:
>
> Is/are there other, better than XSLT, tree-processing languages?

interesting question to ask, though on an xslt list I think everyone
will agree that its xslt.

reason why I presented these trends was to understand why google would
have declining trend for xslt ... doesn't seem to make any sense.

here is a somewhat related (but OT) example

http://www.google.com/trends?q=xml%2C+json&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

xml and json .... xml seems to have declining figures as well;
considering this I think the trends 'search volume index' needs a
little explaining.

pessimistically, I do not think we will ever see wide spread adoption
of XSLT, like lets say java....

http://www.google.com/trends?q=xslt%2C+java&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

I do have a 'point' ... I am trying to gather adhoc and statistically
relevant material on putting some % on the likeliness of any of the
following occurring;

* will XSLT 2.0 experience significant adoption ? what about xslt 2.0
in the browser ?
* XSLT on other devices e.g. hardware, mobile platforms
* will adoption flow from XSLT 1.0 to XSLT 2.0 or ... XSLT 1.0 to XQuery ?
* will we have XSLT 3.0

cheers, Jim