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Re: Which engine? (RE: JavaScript and XSL)


DPawson@rnib.org.uk wrote:
> I'd guess time will smooth this one out. 

It is the source of much debate.. what 'progress' may have been hindered
if Netscape (who IMHO deserve as much loathing and scrutiny as MS) had
waited for the W3C to rationalize and specify requirements for tables,
forms, frames, JavaScript, and, um, <blink>? Why was the W3C's HTML 3.2,
an effort to incorporate these things, a bit of a disaster? How much
better is it to do something 'properly' than to do it just well enough to
be usable by the masses? --all rhetorical questions, to be sure.

I have said it before and will say it again, I think the W3C is naive in
its methodicalness, thinking it has all the time in the world to do things
right, when the inevitable outcome is that the marketplace will forge
ahead and do what's possible (useful or not) now, probably in a way that
is not very well designed nor very compatible, but that raises the
technology bar for everyone else as companies jockey for position.
Anticipation of W3C (re)action is not a compelling subsitute for the
competition between applications in the free market, which can rarely
afford to wait for standards to be handed down from an ivory tower.

The XSL WG made a nice effort to move along quickly, but waiting until the
April 1999 working draft to introduce the extension function mechanism (a
chronological detail I missed in my previous posts) was unfortunate; MSXML
arrived in time to implement some of the December 1998 XSL working draft,
taking some additional liberties that, in hindsight, it probably shouldn't
have, but that we have been stuck with and will continue to be for quite
some time, since Internet Explorer 5.x is so widely deployed.

Just some things to think about, if you're planning on writing any new
'standards' :)

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer at         My XML/XSL resources:
webb.net in Denver, Colorado, USA           http://www.skew.org/xml/


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