Re: [xml-dev] SGML complexity (was: RE: [xml-dev] Re: Recognizing...)

• From: Frans Englich <frans.englich@...>
• To: xml-dev@...
• Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 10:51:11 +0000

On Thursday 31 August 2006 11:27, Michael Kay wrote:
> > That's pretty much what I remember too.  Even the MS products
> > were free to download.  That was one of the aspects of the
> > SGML On The Web project.  It kneecapped the overpriced
> > software market.
>
> Unfortunately, I think it also kneecapped the free software market to some
> extent.

That is also my impression. For example, on the mailing list for libxslt, 
there's almost daily requests to implement '2.0, but it always receives as 
answer that there's no work-force available at those amounts. A typical 
thread:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xslt/2006-August/msg00071.html

However, I do wonder if XSL-T's complexity really has knee capped the open 
source market. What would be the reason? That it requires too much work? 
Linux and Apache are in that case good examples to why it won't hold.

I think we're seeing an initial quibble that at somepoint will be replaced by 
implementations. The demand is there.

I think despite that implementing XSL-T 2.0 requires a lot of work, one should 
do the best out of it. If one plans ahead a bit, one can ride on all that 
talk that the XPath Data Model, Function & Operators, and XPath is shared, 
and therefore get two technologies -- XQuery & XSL-T -- for *almost* the 
price of one. Having those two is indeed interesting, and surely is two tools 
that changes the possibilities one has for working with XML.


Cheers,

		Frans