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At 1:10 PM -0700 5/10/02, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>And when there are so many different kinds of users, and many
>different kinds of designers, each with their own perspective.
>That's almost always the case in this kind of design work. The tools
>we are designing are extremely general.
>
Maybe they need to be less so. XSLT 1.0/XPath 1.0 was designed for
document transformations and browser display. It was not designed as
a general purpose XML query language. Now that new and very different
use cases and requirements are getting piled on top of it, it's
beginning to look not nearly as pretty.
I think maybe we need less general tools, not more. I think perhaps
it's time to consider whether merging XQuery and XPath and XSLT
actually makes sense. This may have been a mistake. The needs of the
communities involved may be just too different for them to
comfortably use the same tools.
Unfortunately, the W3C culture makes it very difficult (close to
impossible really) to admit that occasionally specs go off the rails,
and need to be scrapped so that work can begin from scratch using the
lessons learned from the failed project. I'm not 100% convinced
XSLT/XPath is in that position now. I'm maybe 50% convinced. But I do
think we need to honestly ask the question, and be open to the
possibility of tossing a year's worth of work if that work proves to
be fundamentally flawed.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
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