Re: [xsl] reliability of MSXML

[Pedro Pastor <pps at ua dot es>]

First of all, thank you Mr. Carlisle for your initial explanation.

Secondly, I am terribly sorry for causing this slightly bitter debate. I feel
the fault is mainly mine. I should have been more suspicious about my
stylesheet (half laziness and half "badful thinking" about MS tools).

That point is extensively and clearly explained in several places at "XSLT
Programmer's Reference (2nd edition)", and mainly in chapter 2, "data types"
section. On the other hand, as many times as I read this section, I can not
understand why it was necessary to define two different data types, RTF and
node-set, in the XSLT 1.0. They could be algebraically equivalent if only the
node-set is always forced to have a root node or a RTF is considered a
single-valued node-set.

>From an academic point of view, I rather having XSLT 1.1 new features at hand,
even at the risk of making a mistake (as long as those features are going in
the same direction of the future 2.0 recommendation). If there is some people
disappointed with XSLT evolution is partly the fault of XSLT Working Group,
because of its wandering pace to future recommendations. At this point, I
would greatly appreciate if the people involved in this process could shed
some light about the future evolution towards 2.0 (at least in the key
features of the language).

The tricky point comes out when you have to deliver standardized tools to your
real customers.

Finally, thank you Mr. Kay for letting us play in "higher grounds".

Pedro Pastor
University of Alicante (Spain)


Daniel Veillard wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 03:58:33PM +0000, Trevor Nash wrote:
> > Daniel Veillard wrote:
> >
> > >  It's not too late to *at least* emit a warning when the
> > >conversion occurs. Coming from a Working Group member this reflects
> > >badly, no ? Why should others take the pain of fixing their bugs
> > >when you don't.
> > A little strong, I think.  David already pointed out that the 1.1
>
>   Okay, I apologize to Mike for the harsh wording. But you know,
> it's very frustrating to hear from "would have been" users that
> "oh finally we used somthing else because it didn't worked" and
> learning after the fact that this was due to stylesheets which
> had been developped with Saxon, like a lot of people do because
> it usually gives good error reporting, and that this precise bug
> on someone else software blocked adoption of yours.
>   Most people don't report bugs, they just try another tool until
> they think that it works... No way to catch the problem. I was actually
> tempted to "force" the same bug just to avoid this problem... I
> didn't so far.
>
> Daniel
>
> --
> Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network http://redhat.com/products/network/
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