MITL vs XSLT was: RE: Rant : "Microsoft is compliant with th

Richard Bell wrote:

>You know their parser isn't fully
> compliant with the spec right now, so you don't need to go to a conference
> to find that out and then whinge about it.

Um, we aren't talking about parsers. This is the XSL list. XSLT is the XSL
transformation language specified at http://www.w3.org/tr/xslt.

XSLT is XSLT as defined there. The problem is that there exists another
transformation language which is in some respects similar to XSLT but in
other respects different. Sort of like how C++ and Java are similar but
different. If this language, implemented in IE5 were simply called MIcrosoft
Transformation Language (MITL) then there would be no aruing and no bashing.
The problem is that Microsoft refers to MITL as XSL all over its web site
and this causes endless confusion among developers trying to learn XSLT.

Arguably MITL includes 'experimental' constructs perhaps intended for XSLT
but not. And the XSLT spec is out and has been out since November 1999.
Microsoft has made no attempt to alter their online information to reflect
the fact that MITL isn't XSLT in fact *NEW* lectures continue to describe
MITL as XSLT.

An easy interim solution:

1) Globally replace all "XSL" with "MITL" on MSDN.
2) Globally replace "xsl:" with "mitl:" on MSDN.
2) Replace all namespaces starting with "http://www.w3.org/" with
"http://www.microsoft.com/"

Then, no problem. The solution is that easy.

Jonathan Borden




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