Feedback from DocEng 2006

Hi,

I gave a keynote at DocEng 2006 [1] on pipelining in general and XProc 
in particular. It went down fairly well, but there were four areas where 
the crowd pushed back:

1. If you have to declare exactly the same outputs in the whens and 
otherwise of a choose, then you should do it at the choose level rather 
than the when/otherwise level.

2. Why no loops/recursion?

3. A general plea for a means of expressing out-of-band dependencies, or 
at the very least a side-effect-free/functional="yes|no|maybe" indication.

4. A request that we define what checks should be carried out statically 
  on the pipeline (e.g. on stylesheets/schemas that are defined using 
'here' documents).

I should point out that the attendees were mostly academics/researchers 
(i.e. power-users/implementers), and I'm just reporting on what they 
said; I don't necessarily agree with them.

Cheers,

Jeni

[1] http://www.cwi.nl/events/2006/DocEng2006/
-- 
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com

Received on Saturday, 21 October 2006 20:02:32 UTC