XSL history (was RE: [xsl] XSL Sites)

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

Hi Dave,

I'm editorializing a bit, so alternate viewpoints are encouraged.

I thought Matt's potted history was excellent, except for one detail ... I 
think it arguable that the split of XSLT from XSL proper was motivated 
primarily by the MS implementation. That was a big part of it, but as you 
remember MS's was not the only implementation of early drafts. (There was 
also XT and one or two others in Java, plus that interesting package 
InDelv, etc. etc.) The whole community was discovering how useful the 
transformation part was even without the FOs (targetting HTML). A number of 
early adopters were quite outspoken on this issue, on XSL-List, sometimes 
with lengthy arguments. Check out the list archive.

Now, the completion and finalization of XSLT into a Rec might well have 
been motivated largely by the way the MS implementation of WD/TR-xsl "got 
legs" -- but all that happened in the committee, so it's impossible for us 
mortals to know. Yet sometimes I have wondered whether if MS (or some other 
large simian?) would implement part of FO, with undocumented non-standard 
extensions, FO would quickly come to Rec. ??!??

(FWIW, much as we bang on Microsoft for their apparently predatory 
marketplace tactics, the history shows that technically, at least, XSL owes 
quite a bit to their investment.)

In any case, I think Matt's account might be tempered a wee bit (as you say 
on that side of the pond).

As for dates, here's a chronology. Again, comments welcome:

    August 1997 * XSL Note (proposed by Inso, MS and others):
                * Merger of DSSSL flow object and CSS formatting properties
                  expressed in XML syntax
   January 1998 * XSL Working Group formed, and we are starting to see
                  tools (MS Technology Preview, others)
  February 1998 * [XML Rec finalized]
                * XSL-List started at mulberrytech.com (we owe you, Tony!)
       May 1998 * XSL Requirements Summary
    August 1998 * XSL Working Draft
                * Significantly different from NOTE-XSL
                * Divided into "Tree Construction" and "Formatting Object"
                  portions with different editors
                * XT alpha version released by James Clark
  December 1998 * XSL Working Draft
                * MS IE5 XSL processor largely conforms to this draft
     April 1999 * XSL Working Draft
                * Transformations are now a separate "XSLT" document
                  but still part of XSL specification
      July 1999 * XSLT Working Draft
                * New XPath Working Draft common to XSLT and XPath
  November 1999 * XSLT (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt) and XPath
                  (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath) become Recommendations
     March 2000 * "Last Call" XSL Working Draft

But for the real deal, check out 
http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/OldStuff.html#OldNews

Cheers,
Wendell





At 09:00 AM 5/31/01, you wrote:
> > From: Matt Gushee
>
> >  > One more thing, im quite confuse about this.
> >
> > Yeah, lots of people are. It's inherently confusing.
>
> > IMHO it helps a lot if you know a bit of history:
><snip/>  very helpful Matt.
>
>Can anyone put dates to Matts potted history?
>
>I'd like to add this to the faq, be nice to have some
>of the dates as well, (off list if you think its drifting off topic)
>
>Regards DaveP
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


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