RE: Someone bashing XSL

Simon St.Laurent
>
> Basically, instead of griping about a competitor's whitepaper, I'd really
> like to see some of you write your own whitepapers, treating
> xmlscript as a
> competitor rather than some kind of impudent pretender.

	On what playing field is xmlscript a competitor or competitive? From what I
can tell this is a proprietary scripting language with XML support produced
by an organization which has named itself "DecisionSoft Limited" and who
owns the DNS name "www.xmlscript.org".

	Life is far too short for me to properly evaluate every new language
produced by every programmer who desires to create a "new" minor variation
on a scripting language with regexp matching.

	The fact that the whitepaper uses antique (perhaps baroque) examples of XSL
suggests that the organization which is producing xmlscript is lacking in
resources, again reducing the probability that this version of "xmlscript"
will have a reasonable lifespan. Indeed, I'd put my money on Perl XML
extensions three orders of magnitude (i.e. 1000:1) over "xmlscript" if we
were betting on a contender for a widely used language for which to script
XML transformations (and Javascript+DOM in the same category as Perl).

	From a brief glance, "xmlscript" is hardly a pretender to XSL and I don't
see it as a competitor either, it is free to continue its merry unimpeded
existence. But please, don't suggest that I ought spend as much time
investigating this as I have XSL, or Javascript, or Perl etc.


> If XSL really is
> that much better, I'm sure it can put up with the mosquito bites of 'mere'
> competition from outside the W3C.

	True, and it can. But the quotes are insulting none the less.

>
> And maybe some competition, taken seriously, could improve XSL...
>

	Competition (e.g. DSSSL/CSS) yes. Mere and unsubstantiated insults are not
helpful to intelligent discussions, and are best just ignored.

Jonathan Borden





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