[Mulgara-dev] sparql web app config

Gregg Reynolds dev at mobileink.com
Thu Dec 30 00:23:02 UTC 2010


On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Paul Gearon <gearon at ieee.org> wrote:

>
> You really think that XSL was that successful? I know it's out there,
>

For a pointy-bracket language?  Wildly.


> and a number of systems were built that use it, but I've never run
> across one myself. To me it feels like talking about the success of
> C++. Once upon a time it *was* a big deal, but these days? :-)


It's a good question, actually.  Versions 2 of XSL, XPath, etc. fix some
major problems; they almost amount to a general purpose programming
language.  In fact if "they" (the W3C and the companies represented in the
WG) had not insisted on XML syntax we would now have a wonderful functional
language for document processing.  The original was in fact a LISP variant
(DSSSL, "dissle") that is still in use for SGML.  The version 2 stuff is
very powerful; with it you really can treat a collection of XML docs as a
database.

My guess is that XSL is indeed in very heavy use in document-centric
industries.  For example, I would be very surprised if most of the technical
documentation systems in the world did not involve XSL in some fashion
(excepting for old legacy systems, but even they started adding XSL support
years ago).  By that I mean high-end systems but also any system that uses
XML for documents.  I could be wrong about that, but as far as I know XSL is
the only game in town for the kinds of things it does.  So in its market, it
probably qualifies as very if not wildly successful.  But it would be nice
to have some actual data on how widely and deeply it is used.

-g
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