[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: [possibly off topic] Adoption Rates and Future
Hi,
At the outset let me remark that the question Hank asks is very much on topic, inasmuch as the strategic outlook for XML technologies very much implicates XSL and XSLT. I'll also affirm Mike's counter-questions and hesitations. Yet also, I think it's important to keep in mind that while XML/XSLT is firmly embedded in the stack, as Mike remarks, nevertheless there's frequently (and even "normally") something different about XML/XSLT-based solutions such as, I imagine, the application Hank built at his last job. These are not just off-the-shelf technologies addressing a greatest-common-factor set of requirements, as is more commonly the case for automated information processing systems (most especially those that get press). XML systems in their pure form (that is, when XML isn't just being used as an application file format, but is a design focus in itself) are to a greater or lesser extent always customized, customizable, "bespoke" technologies. This is even the case when it isn't -- as, for example, in successful community-based "standard" XML technologies such as DITA, which maintain significant capability for this even when they're used out of the box. This isn't to say that LAMP-based development isn't also custom development. But HTML/CSS is used in such projects, typically, as a given. Semantic labeling may be used as a means to an end in some ways (such as for driving CSS), and some effort may be made in a database to fit data structures to specific information processing requirements (though even there it will often be cookie-cutter). But XML permits adaptability at a much more profound and fundamental level. Because of this I suspect XML/XSLT will always be unnecessary, and frequently mysterious, to customers who are happier with what they can get shrink-wrapped, having no need or interest in fitting their data set to their problem domain beyond tinkering with a database. And that's okay: if working with their information in a media-centric rather than content-centric way does the job for them, who's complaining? This doesn't mean that the usefulness of XML/XSLT will ever go away (until, that is, it is subsumed into something even more capable). And this speaks also to the difficulty of making a list of successful applications of XML. Many of the most successful, I dare say, won't even be known in public: they are too far in back, doing important work for people who don't necessarily want to share their means and methods. If this sounds paradoxical (because XML is so powerful and so open, it is going to be secret), it is. Lists can be made, but they probably aren't going to be very impressive to those who never look past lists. Cheers, Wendell On 11/2/2011 5:16 PM, Michael Kay wrote: You seem to be asking three separate questions. -- ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================
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