XSL Debate, Leventhal responds to Stephen Deach

[Jonathan Borden]

Simon St.Laurent wrote:

>
>I think you've come to the conclusion that anyone who disagrees with you is
>whining.

    Not at all.  Anyone who disagrees with me is just plain wrong, and this
is a longstanding fact :-)) The whining comment is directed not at those who
disagree with my position, rather at browser vendors who complain that the
attention given to XSL takes away from the ability or desire to use CSS. My
position is that browsers should implement *both*. The argument against XSL
is starting to sound like "I already have too much work to do..."

>
>I write books.  The existence of standards makes those books worth writing,
>but it makes very little difference (financially, at least) whether those
>books cover CSS or XSL.  I have no vendor agenda.  Still, I think Michael
>Leventhal is making some very important points.

    And I respect this position. My fear is that a few inflamatory comments
in a newsgroup and on xml.com will generate an impression that there is
widespread dissatisfaction with XSL in general. The WWW is a large place and
I think there is more than enough room for CSS, XSL and DSSSL. If the
browser vendors implement both CSS and XSL, then the WWW has choice about
what to use.
    Let me clarify this position. I am concerned almost entirely with XSLT
not XSL-FO. The XSL-FO vs. CSS argument is an entirely reasonable one ...
and one which my mind is not yet made up on. XSLT is an entirely different
issue. The "war" however has been declared on XSLT.

>
>I would genuinely like the W3C to sit down and ask if XSL is _good for the
>Web_.  Not good for the XSL community, not good for the DSSSL community,
>but whether it is good for _the Web_.  That is, after all, their job

    What is the Web aside from what the W3C says it is? Is the idea of a web
native distributed computing platform _good_ for the "web"? If so, ought
this include ECMAScript? Java? XSLT?

Jonathan Borden
http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net


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