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[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: is XSLT 2.0 implementable? (was: N : M transforma
 And we wouldn't be doing schema support in XSLT unless there were major vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM who claim that their users are clamouring for it. That makes a lot of sense; and it's interesting to contemplate in view of the evident fact that while these major vendors (hi guys!) are very *active* in the industry -- in the sense of implementing, developing, listening to users (naturally, to *their* clients and users, as we little guys listen to ours), dealing with a set of real problems, reading this list -- we scarcely if ever hear from them in public. The clamoring to which Mike refers is reported only in the committees. (Apparently not even Mike has heard much of it first-hand.) The reasons for this must be complex, even unfathomable, though I can readily imagine that if I were in the same shoes as the engineers and managers at the big vendors, working within the same set of constraints, I'd be doing the same. They are, after all, working for their employers and their clients and customers, as I am working for mine. So, okay. But why push standards development so hard in the direction of their users, when the community at large (which includes many who develop for projects and organizations that don't have the deep pockets of -- or the same set of problems as -- the big guys' clients) is so consistent, indeed amazingly unanimous, in our reluctance to see these particular mechanisms wired into the specifications? Has the pendulum against proprietary technologies swung so far that even an IBM or Microsoft can't say "try this: it's an XSLT processor, with extensions -- well documented, clearly marked with a namespace -- that support matching by schema-derived datatype", or whatever, etc.? Float them in the marketplace first? If the market decides that it wants XSLT processors with schema support then it will indeed get frustrated with products that don't offer it, and vendors of those products will come under pressure to provide it. If, as many people on this list are predicting, users don't care a damn about having schema support, then they are unlikely to miss it. The market will decide. Inevitably. So why wire these things into the standard before giving the market any chance to do anything at all? If W3C ends up killing "XML for the little guy", the big guys will ultimately lose out too. Big, complex specifications -- however much their complexities are "necessary" in the view of one use case or another -- will just make for more fragmentation, stratification, confusion, and a wider culture gap between the haves and (the various varieties of) have-nots. It's already happening. But Cassandra has said all this before.... Cheers, Wendell
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