Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products
June 24, 2005

RSS in Longhorn

by Kevin Dangoor

Microsoft’s Simple List Extensions Specification is, in fact, simple. I do think there is value in where they’re headed with this, because this provides some more machine-readable data that is presently user-configured in tools like Zesty News.

It is great to see something that looks different from the “embrace and extend” Microsoft of old: this spec uses XML namespaces, making it pretty transparent to existing tools. And, the spec is published under a Creative Commons license with a royalty-free grant to use any Microsoft patents that may cover this particular spec.

June 24, 2005

Google AJAXSLT

by Kevin Dangoor

The new Google AJAXSLT provides a JavaScript XSL-T and XPath implementation that you can use when providing AJAX goodness in your apps. It’s licensed under a BSD-style license, so you can use it for whatever you want.

As you can see from the readme, Google had to really work to smooth out differences between browsers, many of which have no exposed XSL or XPath functionality at all. As you can guess, it’s probably not going to be whizzy fast if your browser doesn’t have built-in XSL.

Personally, I have a strong dislike for XSL’s syntax. Though it’s not declarative or as “technically pure”, I prefer the syntax of something like TrimPath JavaScript Templates. And I bet TrimPath’s templates are applied more quickly.

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