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Re: FW: [svg-developers] Re: SVG 1.0 is now a W3C Recommendation



Chris Bayes wrote:

> I think that is a bit unfair. Microsoft was so early to adopt 
> xsl technology they developed and released it while it was still 
> at working draft stage. It was a very good version of the working 
> draft spec. Where they went wrong was not uncluding their xslt 
> version with ie5. But as they had jumped in at a very early stage 
> and shipped systems that included the wd version they had to support 
> it. They were also one of the first fully compliant xslt processors 
> around for quite a while (Saxon was the first and xt was never 
> fully implemented)


I think that's being unduly kind to Microsoft (a crime that can't go
unpunished:-)

The IE5 "XSL" isn't really a good implementation of the December '98 WD
It has lots of extensions and the documentation makes no distinction
between what is in the draft and what isn't, but that's really only a
small point, what they really did wrong was take a draft that said

  The XSL Working Group will not allow early implementation to constrain
  its ability to make changes to this specification prior to final
  release. It is inappropriate to use W3C Working Drafts as reference
  material or to cite them as other than "work in progress".

and take that as the basis for a production release of what is probably
the most widely distributed piece of software on the planet: their web
browser which rather famously is/was deeply integrated with the entire
windows OS.

By doing that they were guaranteeing future confusion over the version
they'd released and they knew they were going to have to support and
the final version of the language which they knew would be different.

Even now Microsoft documentation insists on calling this language "XSL"
to avoid them admitting they made a mistake, and to prolong the
confusion.

David

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