Re: Netscape Support for XSL - client vs server rant

["Jeff Greif" <jmg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Plaudits to Keith for his efforts to support XSLT within Mozilla.

In the various discussions of levels of support in IE5 and Mozilla, I didn't
notice any mention of last year's opposition to supporting XSL within the
Mozilla development team.  See Michael Leventhal's articles "XSL Considered
Harmful", in
http://www.xml.com/pub/1999/05/xsl/xslconsidered_1.html , which asserted
that XSLT was an ugly, unusable language, confusing and delaying the
adoption of CSS, and that anything it could be used for could be better done
with procedural access to the DOM and use of CSS.  The article implied (but
did not state) that Leventhal and his "crack mozilla development team" would
not be in a hurry to implement XSL for Mozilla.  It would be silly to expect
that people donating their time and effort would swallow their principled
objections and build something they had such distaste for.  Note that a
search today of the mozilla.org site failed to turn up any mention of
Leventhal, so perhaps the climate has changed among current developers
there.  It would be interesting to hear more about this history.

Jeff



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