RE: qualitative decline of xsl-list questions

> From: Ben Robb [mailto:Ben@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 11:24 AM
> Subject: RE:  qualitative decline of xsl-list questions
> 
> [ a lot of snippage ]
>
> There are very few people on this list 
> who work for
> commercial companies who do spend the bulk of their time using XSLT
> afaik... Mike Kay, Jeni (though she had to start her own company), and
> maybe a few others.

Add me to the list, though I won't dare to claim the level of expertise the
others possess.  But I'm about to begin my 3rd year in XSLT development, and
since our sites' entire presentation is driven by the language, it's pretty
much all I do (along with some client-side JavaScript).

Hindsight being 20/20, I would likely have saved myself a great deal of pain
had I subscribed to this list from the beginning of my XSLT adventures.  But
I think one of XSLT's great advantages is that if you understand your input
(XML) and what you want to output (XML/HTML/etc.), you pick up this language
very quickly.  (Well, mastering XPath is another discussion entirely . . .)
We've added two more developers, neither of which had prior XSLT experience
but understand the Web quite well, and they achieved a high level of
competency within a matter of weeks.

I think the unfortunate economic downturn has forced a lot of people to wear
new hats, in addition to their other duties, and to acquire new skills quite
rapidly--without being given the luxury of time to learn them effectively.
I hope that newcomers to the language are quicker than I was to utilize the
resources at Dave Pawson's site and to get on this list, and more
importantly, to take the time to just *read* it--learning by trial-and-error
is vastly overrated.

cheers,
b.

| brian martinez                              brian.martinez@xxxxxxxx |
| senior gui programmer                                  303.708.7248 |
| trip network, inc.                                 fax 303.790.9350 |
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