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Re: Netscape Support for XSL - client vs server rant



I apologize for the slight off topic response...I'm starting to get a
little impatient with people who "blame" others who are donating their
free time (nights, weekends, whatever) to deliver a free product...

Heather Lindsay wrote:
> The only ones you
> can blame are microsoft and mazilla for not being able to keep up with
> technology that changes every day (are we asking for too much?).

I couldn't really believe my eyes when I saw this posting.

It's called Mozilla not "mazilla", and feel free to blame _me_, because
I am (with the help of some good contributors) the one donating my free
time (eg. I don't get paid by anyone) to develop the XSLT processor that
will be used in Mozilla. There are a lot of fine people donating their
free time to make a product they believe in, and you want to blame them
for not keeping up with technology. 

As far as "keeping up with technology" ...

I wrote my first XSL processor (in Java) back in 1998 when XSL was only
a "W3C proposal". Basically it was a rewrite of Shawn Russell's Docproc,
for those of you familiar with that tool. Interestingly enough,
Microsoft, a company you are criticizing for not keeping up with
technology, was the lead company on the initial XSL proposal. Over a
period of a couple years the W3C released numerous working drafts and
eventually split off the transformations piece of XSL into XSLT. I
always did my best spending my free time to upgrade my XSLT processor to
keep up with the latest spec. Not being a W3C member, or part of the
Working Group, I always had to play catch up when new drafts came out,
as I had no clue what the changes would be. I think I've done a great
job "keeping up with technology".

In anycase, when I heard a little over a year ago that Mozilla didn't
have an XSLT effort underway, I decided I would port my Java XSLT
processor to C++ and give it to them. Working on my Java based XSL
processor at home didn't leave me any free time to work on the C++
version, so luckily, I was working for a good company (MITRE) which
allowed me to actually start the project on company time (so yes, I got
paid for some of my initial time on the project) and they never got a
dime for their donations to the project.

Having to follow Mozilla's guidelines for portable C++, the porting
turned out to be a difficult task. I couldn't use the STL which is
poorly supported, and was left with no real library of base classes I
could rely on. Since the java version relied on the nice feature rich
library of standard Java classes, I was left to code much of this from
scratch. I also wasn't allowed to use exceptions. I've spent a large
amount of my time working on this, so the Mozilla community will have
XSLT support. There are good people, most of whom, I've never met,
helping to do the Mozilla integration....so here's the scenario...a very
small number of people working for free on a product that will be used
by a very large number of people. These people (the developers) won't
get paid, they won't get any fame, and they will get very little
recognition. So why do they do it? Because they believe in the
technology, and like you they need products that support that
technology. 

So you asked, "Are you asking too much"?

Unless you want to pay these developers...then yes, you are asking too
much. If you don't like the way things are going, why don't you donate
your time and help the effort? And more importantly, think twice before
you criticize the efforts of others, especially when you have the
opportunity to help, just as they are, to build these tools you complain
so much about.

--Keith


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