Nesting XML based languages and scripting languages

[Tim Bray]

At 05:50 PM 4/23/98 -0700, Don Park wrote:
>However, I have heard through the grapevine that there is a lot of XSL
>development activities at Microsoft with at least one project close to
>completion. 

Hmm; bear in mind that XSL is a year away, probably, from being a W3C
Recommendation.  Thus anybody who charges into implementation of a moving
target is incurring some risk as well as potential benefit; at least one
early-XML-adopter is right now feeling the pain of retrofitting case-
sensitivity into running code with an installed base.

Having said that, it's good that people charge ahead with implementation
of pre-release specs because it tends to reveal problems that you just
don't notice until you implement.  And having said *that*, I think that
anyone who implements a business-critical application based on an
unfinished, unratified spec has shitferbrains.

There have certainly been instances, inside W3C committees, where vendors
have argued against changes on the grounds that they'd already implemented
things; so far, such objections have generally failed to carry the day.

On which subject, check out the "Status of this Document" language
in the namespace working draft, elegantly authored by Ralph Swick and
Ora Lassila for the RDF activity, and stolen by me for namespaces.

Bottom line: yes, there are advantages to being inside the process,
but early implementation is a two-edged sword. -T.


xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)