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RE: [Off topic: lessons learned] Re: Why is t here a

• From: Len Bullard <len.bullard@u...>
• To: Jonas Mellin <jonas.mellin@h...>
• Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 14:32:54 -0500

Yes.  It includes the early 90s as well.  At the end of the 80s, various
projects boiled over into one another from the groups working on the CALS
initiative for electronic publishing, IETMs, and others such as the library
projects for the OED.  The early SGML group was small and there were
competitors from the WYSIWYG industry (see Interleaf).  It was fun-ded.
There are lots of contributors from that period still lurking in dark
corners of the web muttering to unwary strangers and newbies.

See the history of Doug Engelbart:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/engelbart.html
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html , 

who had been working the problem since 1962.  There is no single mother of
hypertext but Engelbart is the father 1) because he produced working systems
and 2) because he was there for the birth of the ARPANET.

See Brian Reid and Scribe.  Reid is recently notable for having been fired
from Google for being "too old".  I do hope he makes a lot of money off the
lawsuit.

Yes.  DSSSL is the predecessor of XSL.  HyTime is the other standard.  They
took two distinctly different approaches.  The other idea that survived from
Hytime was architectural forms.  This is the 'middle crowd' (followed the
hypertext pioneers like Engelbart but laid the foundations in the pre-HTML
Cambrian explosion).

Reinventing the wheel is how wheels evolved from rounded rocks to spokes and
wood.  It is not just necessary; it is inevitable.  

Chaos is the engine of evolution.  "Seize the fish!"

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonas Mellin [mailto:jonas.mellin@h...] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 1:57 PM
To: Len Bullard
Cc: Costello, Roger L.; xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  [Off topic: lessons learned] Re:  Why is t
here an "S" in XSLT?

Len Bullard wrote, On 2008-05-20 14:44:
> The group that created the markup standards was originally two groups
> fighting for the authority to create hypertext standards.  On one side
were
> the people who thought of hyperlinks as relationship objects.  The other
> thought of them as abstract style objects.  
Was this back in 80's when SGML was the major issue in markup languages?
> In the end, transformation was
> the single big idea from the style group.  
Does this remark in your opinion encompass DSSSL (which according to Tim 
Ray, is the predecessor of XSL)?
> From the relationship group came
> the notion that addressing and linking are usefully separable concerns.
> Both groups lost to HTML and CSS initially.  Then there was a revolution
> called XML where everything old was new again.
>   
Why stop reinventing the wheel? 8-) My speciality has been reinventied 
in most computer science related research fields with different names.
> Carp diem or squid pro quo.
>   
Austin Powers Goldmember?

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