cmarshall - 7:03 pm on Feb 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

Great post!

I worked with a nightmare called X.409 [portal.acm.org], which was sort of a "flexible container" like XML.

I don't miss it one teeny bit.

I believe in XML. I consider it to be a data transfer medium, and it does that extremely well. The "X" in XML is what it's all about.

The wheels often come off when we try to shoehorn it into programming languages and data manipulation syntaxes.

I believe in XSLT [w3schools.com] as well, but it is a very specific tool, meant for very specific purposes. I think it suffers when people try to shoehorn it into other uses.

I think XSLT, and, to a lesser extent, XML, have been miserably served by their community. The documentation is often unreadable (I have learned to throw the book out after a few intro pages and go it alone. It took a long time for me to come to that conclusion).

There are a great many very intelligent and creative people in the XML community that are so abstracted from the practical implementations of their work that they are well-nigh useless. XSLT is a perfect example. The books universally stink. They have all the information, and they are technically accurate, but they simply can't convey their content in a useful fashion. Almost every example I see out there is based on XSLT 2 [w3.org] and XPath 2 [w3.org], yet there are no practical, free and open source implementations of XSLT/XPath 2. Indeed, the author of much of the standard sells his XSLT 2 processor. XSLT 1 is a widely-available standard (libxslt [xmlsoft.org]), and is even embedded in PHP 5 [us2.php.net].

I remember being in a conversation about this with someone in the XSLT community, and mentioned how important the PHP implementation was to people "getting" XSLT, and was stunned by their response. They simply didn't care. PHP is an "amateur" language, and they were actually very much against it being implemented that way, as it would encourage "unqualified" people to start using XSLT.

This was pretty much exactly the attitude of the Internet community when The September that Never Ended occurred. The "old guard" were horrified, and still, to this day, complain about it.

If AOL hadn't opened to the 'Net, the Internet would still be a geeky footnote.

Sometimes, you just need to open the gates and let the peasants come in...