Feedback from the students in my XProc class

Hi Folks,

Thank you for your responses to the questions from my students. They proved very helpful.

The class finishes this afternoon. Here is feedback from the students thus far:

1. XProc is great! Everyone sees the value of XProc and is excited about it. Many plan to use it in their work.

2. Need better error messages from Calabash. Debugging XProc pipelines was frustrating. There was one error message that came up over and over and was particularly frustrating: null pointer found. In frustration one person said, "This is not ready for prime time."

3. Need more XProc processors. Concern was expressed that Calabash is the only XProc processor available at the present time.

4. Specification going to change? Concern was expressed that XProc is not yet a Recommendation and may change.

5. Two people had their pipelines produce the error "Multiple primary inputs are not allowed." I, along with the whole class examined their pipelines. After 15 minutes we gave up, unable to fix it.

6. Lax validation working? We tried using p:validate-with-xml-schema with the mode option set to 'lax'. Calabash didn't seem to permit lax validation.

7. Need a WYSIWYG tool.

8. Need a Configuration Management (CM) tool.

During the course several bugs were found in my XProc tutorial. I will fix them this weekend and upload it to my web site.

/Roger

Received on Thursday, 21 May 2009 16:47:30 UTC