Thanks for sharing your expert insight. I must say, I'm very
impressed by your activity and omnipresence all around XSL. Thanks
for the great work you're doing.
2010/6/14 Michael Kay <mike(_at_)saxonica(_dot_)com>:
Well, then I'd rather stick to the "adopted standard". (Why is XSLT 2
so badly supported?)
Poor choice of words there. No-one supports XSLT 2.0 badly; they either
support it well, or not at all.
If you mean, why have so few people implemented XSLT 2.0, then I think you
have to ask the question "Why has company|person X not implemented XSLT 2.0"
for a number of values of X, and then see if there is any commonality in the
answers.
For the browser vendors, I think the answer is that none of them is
particularly interested in making the first move. You don't get competitive
advantage in the browser space by being the first to support new standards.
There's a built-in inertia here that's a great drag on the industry.
For Microsoft, the answer is that they lost interest in XSLT, largely
because they became over-enthusiastic about their own proprietary languages,
and because of various power shifts between the various internal groups
interested in XML technology. But that's me trying to read the tea-leaves:
only Microsoft can give you the inside story, and I doubt they ever will.
For a lot of the people who produced open-source XSLT 1.0 engines, I think
you'll find that they did the 1.0 version for fun, or in a vague hope that
they might find some unspecified revenue stream as a spin-off, perhaps
having greatly underestimated the size of the task; and having done it, with
a lot of hard work, a lot of fun, a lot of lost week-ends, and no revenue,
they weren't inclined to start all over again.
But five XSLT 2.0 engines have been shipped, or five-and-a-half if you count
Oracle, and I know of four more that are under development; if we get to the
point where there are nine separately-developed implementations then we will
have achieved far more than most programming language standards. And
although some users are still sticking to XSLT 1.0 because that's the only
thing supported in their favourite environment, a great many more have made
the shift and are very pleased with the productivity benefits that it
brings.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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