Re: Which engine? (RE: JavaScript and XSL)

Ben Robb wrote:
> XT fell back (because James Clark was a little busy editing a
> couple of the w3c specs *grin*, and as far as I know no one took up his
> offer to finish it).

http://4xt.org/ is home to a project to provide support and development
for XT, but IMHO their priorities seem to be a bit backward. They seem to
favor feature bloat and general discussion instead of aggressive
development of bug fixes, conformance, and filling in the gaps, like all
the silently ignored errors, lazy variable evaluation, and source
code & API documentation.

Kudos and many thanks to James for making such an efficient, free XSLT
processor that many of us have been able to build a business around, but I
for one was rather disappointed when it took over 6 months from the last
release to get an announcement that his official development had ceased.

My company cannot afford the risks associated with a 3rd party product
whose support is floundering. We moved to SAXON recently, in spite of the
slight, but noticeable, performance hit, mainly because of the robustness
of the product --in particular, its support for keys and proper HTML
output when indent="yes", something not even the latest MSXML can
achieve-- but also because Mike Kay did a pretty good job documenting the
code and he is still very actively making improvements to the product. I
would hate to have to argue with people about the need for xsl:key,
namespace::, and where not to add whitespace in HTML output, when their
priorities are creating Unix-like shell add-ons, XHTML output handlers,
CSV-to-result-tree-fragment features, etc.

I don't think these things are bad ideas, but one person's requirement for
productivity is another person's toy... if XT is good enough for you
as-is, these things are great new features. If it's not good enough, these
things are annoying deviances from more productive development.

</rant> :)

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer at         My XML/XSL resources:
webb.net in Denver, Colorado, USA           http://www.skew.org/xml/


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